Archive for the ‘Cryonics’ Category

Cryonics (often mistakenly called “cryogenics”) is the practice of cryopreserving humans or animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. The largest current practitioners are two member-owned, non-profit organizations, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, with 74 frozen patients and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan with 75.

The process is not currently reversible. Cryonics can only be performed on humans after clinical death, and a legal determination that further medical care is not appropriate (legal death). The rationale for cryonics is that the process may be reversible in the future if performed soon enough, and that cryopreserved people may not really be dead by standards of future medicine (see information theoretic death).

Cryonics is viewed with skepticism by many scientists and doctors today. However, there is a high representation of scientists among cryonics supporters.[1] Scientific support for cryonics is based on projections of future technology, especially molecular nanotechnology and nanomedicine. Some scientists believe that future medicine[2] will enable molecular-level repair and regeneration of damaged tissues and organs decades or centuries in the future. Disease and aging are also assumed to be reversible.

The central premise of cryonics is that memory, personality, and identity are stored in the structure and chemistry of the brain. While this view is widely accepted in medicine, and brain activity is known to stop and later resume under certain conditions, it is not generally accepted that current methods preserve the brain well enough to permit revival in the future. Cryonics advocates point to studies showing that high concentrations of cryoprotectant circulated through the brain before cooling can largely prevent freezing injury, preserving the fine cell structures of the brain in which memory and identity presumably reside.[3]

To its detractors, the justification for the actual practice of cryonics is unclear, given present limitations of preservation technology. Currently cells, tissues, blood vessels, and some small animal organs can be reversibly cryopreserved. Some frogs can survive for a few months in a partially frozen state a few degrees below freezing, but this is not true cryopreservation. Cryonics advocates counter that demonstrably reversible preservation is not necessary to achieve the present-day goal of cryonics, which is preservation of basic brain information that encodes memory and personal identity. Preservation of this information is said to be sufficient to prevent information theoretic death until future repairs might be possible.

Probably the most famous cryopreserved patient is Ted Williams. The popular urban legend that Walt Disney was cryopreserved is false; he was cremated, and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote enthusiastically of the concept, was cremated and his ashes distributed over the Pacific Ocean. Timothy Leary was a long-time cryonics advocate, and signed up with a major cryonics provider. He changed his mind, however, shortly before his death, and so was not cryopreserved.

Cryonics has traditionally been dismissed by mainstream cryobiology, of which it is arguably a part. The reason generally given for this dismissal is that the freezing process creates ice crystals, which some scientists have claimed damage cells and cellular structures so as to render any future repair impossible. Cryonicists have long argued, however, that the extent of this damage was greatly exaggerated by the critics, presuming that some reasonable attempt is made to perfuse the body with cryoprotectant chemicals (traditionally glycerol) that inhibit ice crystal formation.

According to cryonicists, the ice crystal damage objection became moot around the turn of the millennium, when cryobiologists Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk, of Twenty-First Century Medicine, developed major improvements in cryopreservation technology, including new cryoprotectants and new cryoprotectant mixtures, greatly improving the feasibility of vitrification, and resulting in the near-elimination of ice crystal formation in the brain. Vitrification preserves tissue in a glassy rather than frozen state. In glass, molecules do not rearrange themselves into grainy crystals as they are cooled, but instead become locked together while still randomly arranged as in a fluid, forming a “solid liquid” as the temperature falls below the glass transition temperature. Alcor Life Extension Foundation has since been researching the use of these cryoprotectants, along with a new, faster cooling method, to vitrify whole human brains (neurovitrification). The Cryonics Institute (CI), uses a vitrification solution developed by its in-house cryobiologist, Dr. Yuri Pichugin. CI has developed computer-controlled cooling boxes to ensure that cooling is rapid above Tg (glass transition temperature, solidification temperature) and slow below Tg (to reduce fracturing due to thermal stress).

Current solutions being used for vitrification are stable enough to avoid crystallization even when a vitrified brain is warmed up. This has recently allowed brains to be vitrified, warmed back up, and examined for ice damage using light and electron microscopy. No ice crystal damage was found.[4][5][6] However, if the complete circulation of the protectant in the brain is compromised, protective chemicals may not be able to reach all parts of the brain, and freezing may occur either during cooling or during rewarming. Cryonicists argue, however, that injury caused during cooling might, in the future, be repairable before the vitrified brain is warmed back up, and that damage during rewarming might be prevented by adding more cryoprotectant in the solid state, or by improving rewarming methods. But even given the best vitrification that current technology allows, rewarming still does not allow revival, even if crystallization is avoided, due to the toxic effects of the cryoprotectants. Again, however, cryonicists counter that future technology might be able to overcome this difficulty, and find a way to combat the toxicity after rewarming. If, for example, the toxicity is due to denatured proteins, those proteins could be repaired or replaced.

Some critics have speculated that because a cryonics patient has been declared legally dead, their organs must be dead, and thus unable to allow cryoprotectants to reach the majority of cells. Cryonicists respond that it has been empirically demonstrated that, so long as the cryopreservation process begins immediately after legal death is declared, the individual organs (and perhaps even the patient as a whole) remain biologically alive, and vitrification (particularly of the brain) is quite feasible. This same principle is what allows organs, such as hearts, to be transplanted, even though they come from dead donors.

Cryonics procedures cannot begin until legal pronouncement of death has occurred, and pronouncement is usually based on cessation of heartbeat (only very rarely on brain activity measurements). When the heart stops beating and blood flow ceases, ischemic damage begins. Deprived of oxygen and nutrient, cells, tissues and organs begin to deteriorate. If the heart is restarted after too many minutes have passed, the reintroduced oxygen can cause even more damage due to oxidative stress, a phenomenon known as reperfusion injury. Cryonicists try to minimize ischemic and reperfusion injury by beginning cardio-pulmonary support (much like CPR) and cooling as soon as possible after pronouncement of death. Anti-clotting agents like heparin and antioxidants may be administered. Suspended Animation, Inc is a Florida company that specializes in research into, and implementation of, optimal procedures for minimizing ischemic injury in cryonics rescue.

It is universally agreed by scientists and cryonics advocates that reversing human cryopreservation is not possible with any near-term technology.[7] Those who believe that revival may someday be possible generally look toward advanced bioengineering, molecular nanotechnology, or nanomedicine as key technologies. Revival requires repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing), and freezing in tissues that do not successfully vitrify. In many cases extensive tissue regeneration will be necessary. Hypothetical revival scenarios generally envision repairs being performed by vast numbers of microscopic organisms or devices.[8][9][10][11] These devices would restore healthy cell structure and chemistry at the molecular level, ideally before warming. More radically, mind transfer has also been suggested as a possible revival approach if and when technology is ever developed to scan the memory contents of a preserved brain.

It has often been written that cryonics revival will be a last-in-first-out (LIFO) process. In this view, preservation methods will get progressively better until eventually they are demonstrably reversible, after which medicine will begin to reach back and revive people cryopreserved by more primitive methods. Revival of people cryopreserved by the current combination of neurovitrification and deep-cooling (technically not “freezing”, as cryoprotectant inhibits ice crystallization) may require centuries, if it is possible at all.

It has been claimed that if technologies for general molecular analysis and repair are ever developed, then theoretically any damaged body could be revived. Survival would then depend on whether preserved brain information was sufficient to permit restoration of all or part of the personal identity of the original person, with amnesia being the final dividing line between life and death.

Even if cryonics were scientifically certain to work, there are social obstacles that make success uncertain. The most obvious social obstacle is the prevailing belief that cryonics cannot work, and that cryonics subjects are dead. Although a legal determination of death by contemporary medicine is necessary to implement cryonics, this determination carries with it the implication of futility. By custom and law, dead bodies are objects, not persons with rights or protections. This removal of personhood is a cultural obstacle not faced by living people with even the poorest prognosis. For this reason, cryonics advocates call cryonics subjects patients and argue that morally they shouldnt be considered dead, even though that is their status under present law.

A related question is why future society would want to care for or revive dead people. Cryonicists note that a subset of society already cares for cryonics patients, and has done so for decades. It is assumed that should revival ever become possible, that same subset of society (the advocates who maintained patients long enough for revival to become possible) would pursue revival. They also believe that a future society with technology advanced enough to reverse cryopreservation would necessarily have views of life and death different from society today. They generally reject the idea that they are trying to “raise the dead”, viewing cryonics instead as a highly experimental medical procedure. It has also been suggested that future society may have an interest in revival of cryonics patients for intellectual or historical value, although cryonicists tend to argue that healing and recovering sick people is an ethical imperative regardless of value to society at large.

Neuropreservation is cryopreservation of the brain, usually within the head, with surgical removal and disposal of the rest of the body. Neuropreservation, sometimes called neuro, is one of two distinct preservation options in cryonics, the other being “whole body” preservation.

Neuropreservation is motivated by the fact that the brain is the primary repository of memory and personal identity. (For instance, spinal cord injury victims, organ transplant patients, and amputees appear to retain their personal identity.) It is also motivated by the belief that reversing any type of cryonic preservation is so difficult and complex that any future technology capable of it must by its nature be capable of generalized tissue regeneration, including regrowth of a new body around a repaired brain. Some suggested revival scenarios for whole body patients even involve discarding the original body and regenerating a new one because tissues are so badly damaged by the preservation process. These considerations, along with lower costs, easier transportation in emergencies, and the specific focus on brain preservation quality, have motivated many cryonicists to choose neuropreservation.

The advantages and disadvantages of neuropreservation are often debated among cryonics advocates. Critics of neuropreservation note that the body is a record of much life experience, including learned motor skills. While few cryonicists doubt that a revived neuro patient would be the same person, there are wider questions about how a regenerated body might feel different from the original.[12] Partly for these reasons (as well as for better public relations), the Cryonics Institute preserves only whole bodies. Some proponents of neuropreservation agree with these concerns, but still feel that lower costs and better brain preservation justify preserving only the brain. About three-quarters of the patients stored at Alcor are “neuros”.

Although media sometimes report that cloning is expected to regrow new bodies, cryonics experts generally dismiss cloning as a primitive technology that will be long obsolete before any kind of revival becomes possible. Similarly, although neurosurgeon Robert J. White proved[13] that body transplants were possible in primates, transplantation is dismissed in favor of tissue regeneration as the preferred method for treating neuropreservation and other trauma in future medicine.

Costs of cryonics vary greatly, ranging from $28,000 for whole body cryopreservation by the Cryonics Institute, to $80,000 for neuropreservation by Alcor, or $150,000 for whole body cryopreservation by Alcor or the American Cryonics Society. To some extent these cost differences reflect differences in how fees are quoted. The Cryonics Institute fee doesnt include standby (a team that begins procedures at bedside), transportation costs, or funeral director expenses outside of Michigan, which must be purchased as extras. CI Members wanting Standby and Transport from cryonics professionals can contract for additional payment to the Florida-based company Suspended Animation, Inc.

While cryonics is sometimes suspected of being greatly profitable, the high expenses of doing cryonics are well documented.[14] The expenses are comparable to major transplant surgeries. The largest single expense, especially for whole body cases, is the money that must be set aside to generate interest to pay for maintenance in perpetuity.

The most common method of paying for cryonics is life insurance, which spreads the cost over many years. Cryonics advocates are quick to point out that such insurance is especially affordable for young people. It has been claimed that cryonics is affordable for the vast majority of people in the industrialized world who really want it and plan for it.

Cryonics is based on a view of dying as a process that can be stopped in the minutes, and perhaps hours, following clinical death. If death is not an event that happens suddenly when the heart stops, this raises philosophical questions about what exactly death is. In 2005 an ethics debate in the medical journal, Critical Care, noted few if any patients pronounced dead by todays physicians are in fact truly dead by any scientifically rigorous criteria.[15] Cryonics proponent Thomas Donaldson has argued that death based on cardiac arrest or resuscitation failure is a purely social construction used to justify terminating care of dying patients.[16] In this view, legal death and its aftermath are a form of euthanasia in which sick people are abandoned. Philosopher Max More suggested a distinction between death associated with circumstances and intention versus death that is absolutely irreversible.[17] Absolutely irreversible death has also been called information-theoretic death. Bioethicist James Hughes has written that increasing rights will accrue to cryonics patients as prospects for revival become clearer, noting that recovery of legally dead persons has precedent in the discovery of missing persons.[18]

Ethical and theological opinions of cryonics tend to pivot on the issue of whether cryonics is regarded as interment or medicine. If cryonics is interment, then religious beliefs about death and afterlife may come into consideration. Resuscitation may be deemed impossible by those with religious beliefs because the soul is gone, and according to most religions only God can resurrect the dead. Expensive interment is seen as a waste of resources. If cryonics is regarded as medicine, with legal death as a mere enabling mechanism, then cryonics is a long-term coma with uncertain prognosis. It is continuing to care for sick people when others have given up, and a legitimate use of resources to sustain human life. Cryonics advocates complain that theological dismissal of cryonics because it is interment is a circular argument because calling cryonics “interment” presumes that cryonics cannot work.[19] They believe future technical advances will validate their view that cryonics patients are recoverable, and therefore never really dead.

Alcor has published a vigorous Christian defense of cryonics,[20] including excerpts of a sermon by Lutheran Reverend Kay Glaesner. Noted Christian apologist John Warwick Montgomery has defended cryonics.[21] In 1969, a Roman Catholic priest consecrated the cryonics capsule of Ann DeBlasio, one of the first cryonics patients. In 2002, a Muslim cleric indicated in a media interview that cryonics would be compatible with Islam if it were medicine.

Benjamin Franklin suggested in a famous 1773 letter[22] that it might be possible to preserve human life in a suspended state for centuries. However, the modern era of cryonics began in 1962 when Michigan college physics teacher Robert Ettinger proposed in a privately published book, The Prospect of Immortality,[23] that freezing people may be a way to reach future medical technology. Even though freezing a person is apparently fatal, Ettinger argued that what appears to be fatal today may be reversible in the future. He applied the same argument to the process of dying itself, saying that the early stages of clinical death may be reversible in the future. Combining these two ideas, he suggested that freezing recently deceased people may be a way to save lives.

Slightly before Ettingers book was complete, Evan Cooper[24] (writing as Nathan Duhring) privately published a book called Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now that independently suggested the same idea. Cooper founded the Life Extension Society in 1965 to promote freezing people. Ettinger came to be credited as the originator of cryonics, perhaps because his book was republished by Doubleday in 1964 on recommendation of Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl, and received more publicity. Ettinger also stayed with the movement longer. Nevertheless, cryonics historian R. Michael Perry has written Evan Cooper deserves the principal credit for forming an organized cryonics movement.[25]

The actual word cryonics was invented by Karl Werner in 1965 in conjunction with the founding of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) by Curtis Henderson and Saul Kent that same year. This was followed by the founding of the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM) and Cryonics Society of California (CSC) in 1966, and Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS) in 1969 (renamed the American Cryonics Society, or ACS, in 1985). CSM eventually became the Immortalist Society, a non-profit affiliate of the Cryonics Institute (CI), a cryonics service organization founded by Robert Ettinger in 1976, now the second-largest cryonics organization.

Although there was at least one earlier aborted case, it is generally accepted that the first person frozen with intent of future resuscitation was Dr. James Bedford, a 73-year-old psychology professor frozen under crude conditions by CSC on January 12, 1967. The case made the cover of a limited print run of Life Magazine before the presses were stopped to report the death of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire instead.

Cryonics suffered a major setback in 1979 when it was discovered that nine bodies stored by CSC in a cemetery in Chatsworth, California, thawed due to depletion of funds.[26] Some of the bodies had apparently thawed years earlier without notification. The head of CSC was sued, and negative publicity slowed cryonics growth for years afterward. Of seventeen documented cryonics cases between 1967 and 1973, only James Bedford remains cryopreserved today. Strict financial controls and requirements adopted in response to the Chatsworth scandal have resulted in the successful maintenance of almost all cryonics cases since that era.

The largest cryonics organization today was established by Fred and Linda Chamberlain in 1972 as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia (ALCOR). In 1977 the name was changed to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. In 1982, the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies (IABS) founded by Mike Darwin and Steve Bridge in Indiana merged with Alcor. By combining Darwins technical and communications skills with those of medical scientist Jerry Leaf, this merger is generally regarded as a key event that allowed Alcor to attract a critical mass of knowledgeable people, eventually moving Alcor to a leading position in the field.

During the 1980s Darwin worked with UCLA cardiothoracic surgery researcher Jerry Leaf at Alcor to develop a medical model for cryonics procedures. Prior to Leaf and Darwin, cryonics preparation was little more than a mortuary procedure in which cryoprotectant chemicals were substituted for embalming fluid. Leaf and Darwin showed that CPR and medications applied immediately after cardiac arrest, followed by cardiopulmonary bypass and thoracic surgery for access to major blood vessels, could greatly reduce ischemic injury (injury caused by stopped blood flow) in cryonics patients. They pioneered the cryonics procedure now known as a standby, in which a stabilization team stands by to institute life support procedures at the bedside of a cryonics patient as soon as possible after the heart stops. While supporting blood circulation and oxygenation of cryonics patients was first proposed by Ettinger, and the Cryonics Society of Michigan had a Westinghouse Iron Heart for this purpose as early as the late 1960s, the first consistent documented use of such procedures was in the 1980s.

Cryonics received new support in the 1980s when MIT engineer Eric Drexler started publishing papers and books foreseeing the new field of molecular nanotechnology. His 1986 book, Engines of Creation, included an entire chapter on cryonics applications.[27] Cryonics advocates saw the nascent field of nanotechnology as vindication of their long held view that molecular repair of injured tissue was theoretically possible.[28]

Nanotechnology has also been the cause of controversy within the cryonics field, with some cryonics advocates arguing that sophisticated preservation methods arent necessary because nanotechnology is necessary and sufficient for cryonics to work. Critics countered that believing nanotechnology is necessary and sufficient without regard to preservation quality is more religion than science. The simultaneous advent of Leaf and Darwins medical model of cryonics, and the nanotechnology repair paradigm, polarized cryonics into two schools of thought that persist to the present day.[29] One school tends to believe that simple inexpensive procedures administered by morticians are sufficient, while the other advocates monitoring and maintaining viability by contemporary medical methods as far as possible into the procedure, with reversible suspended animation as an ultimate goal.

In the late 1980s a nexus of favorable circumstances, including technical progress, support from nanotechnology experts, and effective communications, led to a period of rapid growth, especially of Alcor. Alcors membership expanded ten-fold within a decade, with a 30% annual growth rate between 1988 and 1992.

Alcor was disrupted by political turmoil in 1993 when a group of activists left to start the CryoCare Foundation,[30] and associated for-profit companies CryoSpan, Inc. (headed by Paul Wakfer) and BioPreservation, Inc.[31] (headed by Mike Darwin). Darwin and collaborators made many technical advances during this time period, including a landmark study documenting high quality brain preservation by freezing with high concentrations of glycerol.[32] CryoCare ceased operations in 1999 when they were unable to renew their service contract with BioPreservation. CryoCares two patients stored at CryoSpan were transferred to Alcor. Several ACS patients stored at CryoSpan were transferred to CI.

There have been numerous, often transient, for-profit companies involved in cryonics. For-profit companies were often paired or affiliated with non-profit groups they served. Some of these companies, with non-profits they served in parentheses, were Cryonic Interment, Inc. (CSC), Cryo-Span Corporation (CSNY), Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation (CSC and CSNY), Manrise Corporation (Alcor), CryoVita, Inc. (Alcor), BioTransport, Inc. (Alcor), Trans Time, Inc.[33] (BACS), Soma, Inc. (IABS), CryoSpan, Inc. (CryoCare and ACS), BioPreservation, Inc. (CryoCare and ACS), Kryos, Inc. (ACS), Suspended Animation, Inc.[34] (CI, ACS, and Alcor). Only Trans Time and Suspended Animation still exist. Apparently none of the companies were ever profitable. The cryonics field seems to have largely consolidated around three non-profit groups, Alcor, Cryonics Institute (CI), and the American Cryonics Society (ACS) all deriving significant income from bequests and donations.

As research in the 1990s revealed in greater detail the damaging effects of freezing, there was a trend to use higher concentrations of glycerol cryoprotectant to prevent freezing injury. In 2001 Alcor began using vitrification (a technology borrowed from mainstream organ preservation research) in an attempt to completely prevent ice formation during cold preservation. Because vitrification technology could then only be applied to the head, heads and bodies were sometimes separated to optimize preservation of the brain, causing much public confusion.

In 2005 Alcor began applying vitrification (or attempted vitrification[35]) treatment to the whole body simultaneously without removal of the head. In the same year, the Cryonics Institute began using a new procedure in which the head was vitrified while still attached to the body, which was frozen without any cryoprotectant.[36] A year later the Cryonics Institute began perfusing the body with ethylene glycol.[37]

When the baseball star Ted Williams was cryopreserved by Alcor in 2002 a family dispute arose as to whether Ted had really wanted to be cryopreserved. Following a July, 2003 Sports Illustrated article claiming that Alcor had mishandled Ted Williams,[38][39][40] Alcor had to fight for its existence in the Arizona legislature.[41] At minimum, Alcor could have been denied use of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which could have impaired its ability to gain rapid access to cryonics patients. Despite not being responsible for Ted Williams, the media blitz resulted in the Cryonics Institute (CI) being placed under a “Cease and Desist” order by the State of Michigan for six months. Finally the Michigan government decided to regulate CI as a cemetery.

Alcor currently maintains about 75 cryonics patients in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Cryonics Institute also maintains about 75 human patients (along with about 40 pets) at its Clinton Township, Michigan facility. There are support groups in Europe, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. There is also a small cryonics facility reported to exist in Russia storing two neuropatients called KrioRus, and plans for a facility in Australia.

Procedures similar to cryonics have been featured in innumerable science fiction stories to aid space travel, or as means to transport a character from the past into the future. In addition to accomplishing whatever the character’s primary task is in the future, he or she must cope with the strangeness of a new world, which may contain only traces of their previous surroundings. This prospect of alienation is often cited as a major reason for the unpopularity of cryonics.

Relatively few stories have been published concerning the primary objective and definition of cryonics, which is medical time travel. Novels with this theme include the national best-seller The First Immortal by James Halperin, The Age of the Pussyfoot by Fred Pohl, Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield, Chiller by Sterling Blake (aka Gregory Benford), Ralphs Journey by David Pizer, and Formerly Brandewyne by Jude Liebermann. The novel Fiasco by Stanisaw Lem raised the question of whether a person cryopreserved for centuries and then revived with amnesia is still the same person. A 1931 short story by Neil R. Jones called The Jameson Satellite has been credited with giving Robert Ettinger the seed of the idea of cryonics when he was a teenager.

Movies featuring cryonics for medical purposes include the Woody Allen comedy, Sleeper, and the films Late for Dinner and Abre los Ojos (remade as Vanilla Sky). The Austin Powers series of films use cryonics as a humorous effect and as one of the main basis in the storyline . One of the most famous movies regarding a cryonics-like process was 1992’s Forever Young, starring Mel Gibson. Although not about cryonics per se, the Ron Howard film Cocoon has been hailed by cryonics advocates as expressing the values motivating cryonics better than any other film.[42]

On television, producer David E. Kelley wrote well-researched and essentially accurate portrayals of cryonics for the T.V. shows L.A. Law (1990 episode[43]), Picket Fences (1994 episode[44]), and Boston Legal (2005 episode[45]). In each case, there was a dying plaintiff petitioning a court for the right to elective cryopreservation. The episode “The Neutral Zone” from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation also featured three cryopreserved people in an ancient spacecraft. They had legally died in the 20th century, but were viable and recoverable by 24th century technology. The 1987 episode of Miami Vice “The Big Thaw” featured a cryopreserved reggae singer whose wife wants his revival stopped so she can inherit his estate. The episode “When We Dead Awaken” of seaQuest DSV features Lieutenant James Brody’s mother having been placed in cryonic stasis following a terminal infection. Cryonics was also satirized by the comedy cartoon series Futurama, in which the character, Philip J. Fry, is accidentally cryopreserved at the turn of the millennium on December 31st 1999, and revived on December 31st 2999, a thousand years later.

Comic books also feature characters that have been affected by cryonics. Jean Grey, a superheroine from Uncanny X-Men, had been revived after her body was cryonically stored due to a fatal attack from Sentinels. The future society depicted in Warren Ellis’s series Transmetropolitan includes ‘revivals,’ that is, individuals who had been cryonically preserved in centuries past and then revived. Many revivals are psychologically unprepared for a society so radically different from the one they had known and are consequently unable to care for themselves.

Songs about cryonics include “Crionics” by Slayer (from the album Show No Mercy) and “Gelid Remains” by Demolition Hammer (from the album “Tortured Existence”).

Cryonicists have been able to form cryonics societies in highly populated areas (see history section), have regular meetings, publish magazines and hold conferences. Saul Kent and Evan Cooper as well as Fred and Linda Chamberlain were active in organizing cryonics conferences in the early years of cryonics. The magazines of the cryonics organizations have also helped keep members of the cryonics community informed about events and common problems. On July 24, 1988 a Ph.D. in computer science named Kevin Brown started an electronic mailing list called CryoNet[46] that became a powerful tool of communication for the cryonics community. Numerous other mailing lists and web forums for discussing cryonics and the affairs of particular organizations have since appeared, but CryoNet remains a central point of contact for cryonicists.

Cryonicists have also had a common jargon, including their use of the words patient, death, deanimation and suspension. The phrase cryonic suspension to describe cryopreservation is falling into disfavor, partly because cryopreservation is not really suspended animation and human bodies or heads are not buoyant enough in liquid nitrogen to be suspended. As in other subcultures, some members of the community can have strong feelings about the use of “politically correct” cryonics language.

There is a potent thread winding its way through generations of human culture. From Ancient Egyptian rituals to Kurzweils Singularity, many paths have sprung up leading to the same elusive destination: immortality.

Today, the concept is as popular as its ever been, and technological advances are giving people hope that immortality, or at very least radical life extension, may be within reach. Is modern technology advanced enough to give people a second chance through cryonics?

Robert C. W. Ettingers seminal work, The Prospect Of Immortality, detailed many of the scientific, moral, and economic implications of cryogenically freezing humans for later reanimation. It was after that book was published in 1962 that the idea of freezing ones body after death began to take hold.

One of the most pressing questions is, even if were able to revive a person who has been cryogenically preserved, will the persons memories and personality remain intact? Ettinger posits that long-term memory is stored in the brain as a long-lasting structural modification. Basically, those memories will remain, even if the brains power is turned off.

Source

There are three main steps in the cryogenic process:

1) Immediately after a patient dies, the body is cooled with ice packs and transported to the freezing location.

2) Next, blood is drained from the patients body and replaced with a cryoprotectant (basically the same antifreeze solution used to transport organs destined for transplant).

3) Finally, once the body arrives at the cryonic preservation facility, the body is cooled to -196C (-320.8F) over the course of two weeks. Bodies are generally stored upside-down in a tank of liquid nitrogen.

At prices ranging from about $30,000 to $200,000, cryopreservation may sound like an option reserved for the wealthy, but many people fund the procedure by naming a cryonics company as the primary benefactor of their life insurance policy. Meanwhile, in the event of a death that doesnt allow for preservation of the body, the money goes to secondary beneficiaries.

Even if we do eventually find a way to reanimate frozen humans, another important consideration is how those people would take care of themselves financially. Thats where a cryonics or personal revival trust comes into play. A twist on a traditional dynastic trust, this arrangement ensures that there are funds to cover costs of the cryopreservation, as well as ensure the grantor would have assets when theyre unthawed. Of course, there are risks involved beyond the slim possibility of reanimation. The legal code in hundreds of years could be vastly different than today.

If you created a trust for specific purposes in 1711, it is unlikely it would function in the same way today.

Kris Knaplund, Law Professor, Pepperdine University

At last count, there are already 346 people in the deep freeze, with thousands more on the waiting list. As technology improves, those numbers are sure to continue rising.

Time will tell whether cryonically preserved people are able to cheat death. In the meantime? The cryonics industry is alive and well.

Interested in more infographics on future technology?Help us make the first Visual Capitalist book a reality on Kickstarter.

If death was imminent, would you consider cryogenically freezing yourself, with the hopes that one day future technology would bring you back to life? Battling with brain cancer, thats what 22 year old Kim Suozzi did, and there are others just like her! But does this have any basis in science? Trace has the answers!

Note: A PDF version of this article with images and appendixes is available here.

A Literal Death Sentence

One unpleasant issue in cryonics is the hostile wife phenomenon. The authors of this article know of a number of high profile cryonicists who need to hide their cryonics activities from their wives and ex-high profile cryonicists who had to choose between cryonics and their relationship. We also know of men who would like to make cryonics arrangements but have not been able to do so because of resistance from their wives or girlfriends. In such cases, the female partner can be described as nothing less than hostile toward cryonics. As a result, these men face certain death as a consequence of their partners hostility.

While it is not unusual for any two people to have differing points of view regarding cryonics, men are more interested in making cryonics arrangements. A recent membership update from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation reports that 667 males and 198 females have made cryonics arrangements. Although no formal data are available, it is common knowledge that a substantial number of these female cryonicists signed up after being persuaded by their husbands or boyfriends. For whatever reason, males are more interested in cryonics than females. These issues raise an obvious question: are women more hostile to cryonics than men?

There is no direct answer to this question since the requisite data have not been collected. However, both the gravity and magnitude of the problem, as we are about to detail, suggests this as a fertile, if not urgent, area for future research. One consequence of men being more interested in cryonics than women is that heterosexual men are more often faced with hostile wives and girlfriends than the other way round. While this may sound alarming, such disagreements can easily be overcome if the love and trust in a relationship is strong enough that the disagreeing party can still cede the right to make (and keep) cryonics arrangements to the other individual. However, even formerly amenable wives can become increasingly hostile, frequently in accordance with their husbands increasingly personal and active involvement in cryonics.

An Historical Overview

From its inception in 1964, cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists. While this phenomenon, as previously noted, is mostly confined to hostility from wives or girlfriends, rather than husbands or boyfriends of cryonicists, there are exceptions. One of us (Darwin) knows of two divorces resulting from hostile husbands, and several cases where the husband has delivered an ultimatum to his wife to either cease involvement with cryonics or face dissolution of the marriage(1). An example of male spousal hostility to cryonics is the case of a pioneering female cryonicist who first signed up at the start of the cryonics movement in 1964 and who had a 30+ year history of intense cryonics activism, including serving as an Officer or Director of two early cryonics organizations. When she became incapacitated by Alzheimers disease, her husband, (who had long been unhappy with her involvement in cryonics) cancelled her cryonics and cryonics funding arrangements, and declined to allow her to be cryopreserved. Another co-author (Aschwin de Wolf) was involved in helping out in a situation where the ex-husband of a female friend would not approve cryonics arrangements for his minor children, despite a strong desire from the mother and the children to make such arrangements.

Dating this phenomenon to the earliest days of cryonics is not difficult. In 1968 Robert Ettinger, the father of the cryonics movement, wrote:

This is not a hobby or conversation piece: it is the principal activity of this phase of our lives; it is the struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate. Save your money; get another job and save more money. Sometimes a fool will blunder through, but dont count on it. The universe has no malice, but neither has it mercy, and a miss is as good as a mile.

It is notable, and by no means accidental, that Ettinger uses the words, Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate, as opposed to divorce your husband or the gender neutral divorce your spouse. Notwithstanding the few cases of hostile husbands or boyfriends, the phenomenon of the hostile spouse is almost exclusively a female phenomenon. There is no reason to be surprised about the fact that only one partner in a relationship has made cryonics arrangements. What needs explanation is why partners are actively hostile to the other partners cryonics arrangements or activities.

Over the 40 years of his active involvement, one of us (Darwin) has kept a log of the instances where, in his personal experience, hostile spouses or girlfriends have prevented, reduced or reversed the involvement of their male partner in cryonics. This list (see appendix) is restricted to situations where Darwin had direct knowledge of the conflict and was an Officer, Director or employee of the cryonics organization under whose auspices the incident took place. This log spans the years 1978 to 1986, an 8 year period. The motivating events for keeping such a log were the intense hostility he experienced from Diane Henderson, the wife of Curtis Henderson, then President of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY)) during visits he made to CSNY as a teenager. While this hostility was to cryonics in general, it had as its focus anyone perceived to be facilitating her husbands continued involvement in cryonics. The primary targets were thus Henderson, Darwin and the Vice President of CSNY Gillian Cummings (nee Beverly Greenburg). Curtis Henderson has stated that he believes this antipathy materially contributed to the death of Gillian Cummings in 1972:

Because the (Cryo-Span) facility was not heated and it was bitterly cold at night in the winter on Long Island, Beverly (Gillian) used to spend the night at my home in Sayville on the couch in the CSNY office. Dianes increasingly hostility to Beverly, and to anything or anyone involved in cryonics, put an end to that. A few days before Beverlys death the situation between Diane and I had reached a breaking point. She demanded that I cease involvement in cryonics and close the facility. When I refused, she took our son and went to stay at her mothers home. This is a hard thing to bear and the one thing I didnt want to do was to further antagonize Diane or provide any basis for claims of infidelity in the event she returned home and found Beverly in the house. So, that night I told Beverly she could not spend the night at 9 Holmes Court. Instead, she spent the night in the unheated facility. She was found dead the next day, her keys in her car ignition and the gas tank empty. She was in the habit of running the engine briefly in the closed storage bay to warm up the car enough so she could get back to sleep. She probably dozed off and left the engine running. The only things I can say about that incident is that it has left me with gnawing guilt and a great deal of anger. It was senseless; senseless and irrational.(2)

The second incident that influenced Darwin to keep this record was an experience he had during the start-up of the Indiana cryonics organization the Institute for Advanced Biological Studies (IABS). Desperate for competent and energetic members and administrators, both Darwin and IABS President Steve Bridge experienced intense frustration when two enthusiastic and talented young men withdrew from involvement in IABS and cryonics because of the extreme hostility to cryonics on the part of their wives. This was one of many such incidents, but these two were especially significant because they deprived the nascent cryonics organization of a skilled businessman and potential leader, and of a competent engineer who had assisted with the fabrication of perfusion and cool-down equipment.

While neither objective nor rigorously scientific, the results of Darwins log are nevertheless instructive. The results are summarized in Table 1 (see appendix).

The 91 people listed in this table include 3 whose deaths are directly attributable to hostility or active intervention on the part of women. This does not include the many instances since 1987 where wives, mothers, sisters, or female business partners have materially interfered with a patients cryopreservation(3) or actually caused the patient not to be cryopreserved or removed from cryopreservation(4). Nor does it reflect the doubtless many more cases where we had no idea that:

The wifes hostility/objections/commands/threats prevented the husband from inquiring in the first place.

The wifes hostility/objections/commands/threats prevented the husband from signing up but no one knew it.

The wifes hostility/objections/commands/threats prevented the husband who was a member from volunteering, attending meetings, or otherwise becoming more involved, including standing for directorship positions and participating in research.

The wifes hostility/objections/commands/threats resulted in lapse of membership.

Prospective patients did not inquire because they knew the wifes hostility/objections/commands/threats would cause loss of support, emotional turmoil, or make signing up futile.

Potential members and patients did not sign up because they were lied to by their female spouses about some important aspect of cryonics.

Why are Women Disproportionately Hostile to Cryonics?

The most immediate and straightforward reasons posited for the hostility of women to cryonics are financial. When the partner with cryonics arrangements dies, life insurance and inheritance funds will go to the cryonics organization instead of to the partner or their children. Some nasty battles have been fought over the inheritance of cryonics patients, including attempts of family members to delay informing the cryonics organization that the member had died, if an attempt was made at alll(5). On average, women live longer than men and can have a financial interest in their husbands forgoing cryonics arrangements. Many women also cite the social injustice of cryonics and profess to feel guilt and shame that their families money is being spent on a trivial, useless, and above all, selfish action when so many people who could be saved are dying of poverty and hunger now.

A more speculative reason is that cryonics can be seen to compete with having children or family life altogether. This argument posits that if death can be overcome by technological means, surrogate immortality in the form of reproducing genes becomes redundant. This argument could even explain why many cryonicists are single men (aside from the common sense observation that few women want to date the archetypical cryonics nerd).

Another reason, articulated by several religious female spouses of male cryonicists, is separation in the afterlife. This presumes not only that cryonics works, but that it results not merely in practical immortality, but in actual immortality; a state where death never occurs and the spouse survives an infinitely long time. This position also excludes the belief common to all sects of Christianity and Islam that temporal existence, even for the living, will end with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ or an imposed end to the Universe and time of judgment by Allah. Another, perhaps more credible, but unarguably more selfish, interpretation of this position is what one of us (Darwin) has termed post reanimation jealousy. When women with strong religious convictions who give separation in the afterlife as the reason they object to their husbands cryopreservation are closely questioned, it emerges that this is not, in fact, their primary concern. The concern that emerges from such discussion is that if cryonics is successful for the husband, he will not only resume living, he may well do so for a vast period of time during which he can reasonably be expected to form romantic attachments to other women, engage in purely sexual relationships or have sexual encounters with other women, or even marry another woman (or women), father children with them and start a new family. This prospect evokes obvious insecurity, jealousy and a nearly universal expression on the part of the wives that such a situation is unfair, wrong and unnatural. Interestingly, a few women who are neither religious nor believers in a metaphysical afterlife have voiced the same concerns. The message here may be If Ive got to die then youve got to die too! As La Rochefoucauld famously said, with a different meaning in mind, Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.

Getting More Specific

While these arguments may plausibly address the hostility so many women feel toward their husbands cryopreservation arrangements, they do not address the much more common and more immediate negative reaction women typically display to even the prospect of their spouse or boyfriend becoming involved in cryonics. In such instances it could, of course, be argued that in reality these women are in fact objecting to the act of cryopreservation itself, since that is the logical outcome of their husbands involvement. The problem with this objection is that it fails to consider the reasons women often voice as being material to their hostility to cryonics. A shortlist of these objections is as follows:

o Fear of social ostracism: Involvement with cryonics is not commonplace in any society on the planet and any unusual, atypical or nonconformist behaviour carries with it the risk of reduction in social status, gossip, doubts about good judgment and rationality, and in the worst case, ridicule and ostracism.

o Embarrassment and inadequacy: Even if there is no discernible negative social impact, the fact that her husband is involved with cryonics, or worse still, signed up for neuro-cryopreservation, is frequently perceived as a source of profound embarrassment. Many women are uncomfortable being singled out or made the center of attention because of nonconformist behaviour on the part of any member of their family whose behaviour they perceive they may be held accountable for. A closely related concern is that they will be put in the position of having to both explain and justify their husbands unconventional choice. Such explanations and justifications are often correctly perceived to require considerable understanding of the premises, underlying scientific arguments, and most troubling, a detailed explication of the biomedical procedures used to induce cryopreservation as well as the physical and financial aspects of long term cryogenic care. This leaves out the even more daunting mastery of the scientific, technological, social and philosophical arguments that address the issue of reanimation and reintegration of cryonics patients into society. Also unaddressed are the thorny issues of the theological and ethical issues cryonics raises.

o Resource drain: Women understand that their husbands and boyfriends have interests, hobbies and avocations which are not a part of their romantic or even day-to-day relationship. Preoccupation with sports, automobiles, fishing, boating, golfing, or costly or dangerous pursuits, such as scuba diving or sky diving are frequently sources of friction in marriages. These activities inevitably result in a drain of both time and money spent with the wife and children time and money that could clearly be spent improving the quality and quantity of martial life, as well as providing assets for education of the children and additional savings to serve as a reserve in hard economic times, or times of family crisis.

o The prospect of homosocial or ideologically-driven alienation: Many, if not most, women object to exclusively or strongly homosocial activity on the part of their spouses. The social structure in most of the world today is predominately homosocial, wherein heterosexual men engage heavily or even almost exclusively in social (not sexual) interaction with other men. In these societies women are excluded from discussion of ideas, politics, business, current events, and usually religion. Until the mid-20th Century the social fabric of the U.S. and Europe was predominately homosocial with women retiring to a separate area of the home while men discussed politics, philosophy, the arts and sciences, and other non-domestic issues. Heterosexual men, past and present, also like to engage in exclusively homosocial activities ranging from the informal boys night out to more structured ventures such as camping, hunting and participation in male-only fraternal organizations. That these activities can and do lead some men to spend large fractions of their non-working time involved in such activities is a well known and wholly justified source of concern to women. After even glancing contact with cryonics, women quickly perceive that cryonics, and particularly activist cryonics, is populated almost exclusively by men and therefore represents a homosocial threat. It should also be noted that after men marry it is typical that much or even all of their socializing with their single male friends stops.

An even more anxiety provoking prospect is that of ideological alienation of the husband from his wife and family. Regardless of whether or not cryonics is perceived as a cult, it is justifiably understood to embrace a world view and a value system that is radically different from both the social norm and from the philosophical and ideological perspective of the wife or that which the husband and wife shared before cryonics was introduced into the equation. Wives often express anxiety and concern that their husbands may change drastically in both beliefs and behavior as a result of involvement with cryonics and that this might result in alienation within the marriage or even divorce.

o Religious and childrearing concerns: Most people of faith, regardless of gender, will have questions over the compatibility of cryonics and religion, at least when they first seriously contemplate the idea. To the deeply religious, absent a clear statement from the understood authority in their faith (the Pope, minister or church council, rabbi, or one of the hojjatoleslam in Islam) cryonics may be the source of lasting anxiety and uncertainty about whether it really is compatible with their faith. Even absent concerns about the religious acceptability of cryonics per se, there are often concerns about its impact on the religiosity and adherence to cultural values on the part of the children. The majority of observant Jews in both the U.S. and Israel are agnostic or atheist, but still highly value and consider critical to their survival and identity observance of Jewish cultural practices and rituals. Cryonics is often perceived as contrary to or corrosive of these values and practices.

o Other women: While cryonics is mostly a male pursuit, there are women involved and active, and many of them are single. Wives (or girlfriends) justifiably worry that another woman who shares their husbands enthusiasm for cryonics, shares his newly acquired world view and offers the prospect of a truly durable relationship one that may last for centuries or millennia may win their husbands affections. This is by no means a theoretical fear because this has happened a number of times over the years in cryonics. Perhaps the first and most publicly acknowledged instance of this was the divorce of Fred Chamberlain from his wife (and separation from his two children) and the break-up of the long-term relationship between Linda McClintock (nee Linda Chamberlain) and her long-time significant other as a result of Fred and Linda working together on a committee to organize the Third National Conference On Cryonics (sponsored the Cryonics Society of California).

The Underlying Reason?

While few would argue that there are not large, statistically demonstrable differences between men and women in terms of temperament, exploratory and risk taking behaviour as well as religiosity and intellectual and recreational pursuits, there is intense controversy as to whether these differences are due to biology, or to cultural and social factors that both limit and warp womens innate intellectual and behavioral parity with men. Regardless of whether these observed differences are rooted in nature or nurture, biology or culture, they are certainly real and they have had enormous impact on society and on the dynamic between men and women.

In his remarkable book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (HarperCollins, New York, 2003, ISBN 0-06-019247-X) Charles Murray evaluates the origin and the creators of human artistic, scientific, technological and intellectual accomplishments over the span of what is essentially recorded history. Murray does this using the arguably objective procedure of calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, peer reviewed publications and other easily objectifiable measures of intellectual significance. Murray uses the well developed and widely accepted technique of historiometry, which is the historical study of human progress or individual personal characteristics, using statistics to analyze references to famous people and their discoveries in relatively neutral texts. Historiometery traces its origins to the work of Adolphe Quetelet, a 19th Century Belgian mathematician, who primarily studied the relationship between age and intellectual or artistic achievement.

Murray found that nearly all scientific progress, and all important scientific and artistic ideas, were made by white Europeans or their descendants (such as white Americans, Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders). With few exceptions these core innovators were also male.

A number of studies have evaluated risk-taking behavior in males as contrasted with females. These studies have predominately concluded that men are not only bigger risk-takers, but that they engage in much more dangerous risk taking(7). An elegant and objective evaluation of sex-related differences in the selection of a successful strategy when facing novelty is the work of Catherine Brandner, who used a simple visuo-spatial task to investigate exploratory behavior as a specific response to novelty. Brandner found that strategies used by women and men to solve an exploratory task that may be seen as involving a trading off of risk versus reward differed markedly by gender. Brandner concludes: This study has first shown that the searching strategies used by women and men to solve an exploratory task that may be seen as involving trading off of risk and reward differed according to sex. Women adopted a local searching strategy in which the metric distance between what is already known and what is unknown was reduced. Men adopted a global strategy based on an approximately uniform distribution of choices. These findings appear to be compatible with a female frame of mind expressing careful consideration of all circumstances and possible consequences before making a decision.

Unquestionably, cryonics can be classified as risk-taking activity and exploratory behavior (one-way time travel to the future!) and it is also dependent upon a global approach to problem solving as opposed to the more meticulous and incremental approach to problem solving favored by women. Cryonics also demands paradigm changing innovative thinking that is closely allied with, if not identical to, the kinds of scientific, artistic and cultural thought that Murray has demonstrated are almost exclusively the province of males, and white males at that (which also raises the issue of why so few people of color are involved in cryonics). Perhaps it is these fundamental differences between men and women that determine not only male preference for, and general lack of hostility to, cryonics (at least as regards spouses and other immediate family members choices), but also the existence of a subgroup of women who are virulently opposed to cryonics, or more accurately, to the involvement of their husbands in cryonics.

Conclusion

Although the hostility of some women to their partners cryonics arrangements and activism is disturbing, the phenomenon is real. One high profile cryonicist once said: You can get another wife, but you cant get another life. Such words of wisdom need to be heeded, but it is understandable that some cryonicists need to make a trade-off between cryonics and other values. Hopefully, the forgoing analysis will offer some concrete areas of potential conflict, perceived or real, that can be addressed by both emotional reassurance and reason. Identifying the problems is certainly a necessary first step to resolving them.

Endnotes

1. Brenda Peters, a long-time female cryonics activist, Alcor Board member and Founding President of CryoCare was married to a Hollywood screenwriter and producer and has stated, while by no means the sole reason for dissolution of her marriage, cryonics played an important role in the breakup. Former Alcor Treasurer and stalwart cryonicist Sherry Cosgrove faced a similar ultimatum in 1987 and chose to cease active involvement in cryonics and revoke her cryopreservation arrangements.

3. Alcor patient A-1036 suffered ~10 minutes of ischemic injury without cardiopulmonary support due to interference from his sister and female business partner. A-1049 suffered ~30 minutes of ischemic injury due to interference from his mother and sister.

4. Alcor patient A-1242 was removed from cryopreservation under court order as a result of litigation brought against Alcor and the patients husband by the patients sister, who objected to cryopreservation. Alcor patient A-2127 died while in the sign up process due to hostile female relatives. Alcor patient A-1099 suffered prolonged ischemia, embalming and straight freezing and was almost cremated due to the non-compliance of his sisters with his cryonics arrangements.

5. Alcor patient A-1242 was removed from cryopreservation under court order as a result of litigation brought against Alcor and the patients husband by the patients sister, who objected to cryopreservation. Alcor patient A-2127 died while in the sign up process due to hostile female relatives. Alcor patient A-1099 suffered prolonged ischemia, embalming and straight freezing and was almost cremated due to the non-compliance of his sisters with his cryonics arrangements.

Frozen Dead GuyHome of The Frozen Dead Guy (AKA Bredo Morstoel)The Iceman’s Chronicle…Contact the Iceman for information on where to get your copy…and for booksignings and special events.Get information on events for 2013 FDGDays>>>>Get Twitter Tweets from Botheiceman@Twitter.com!!!What’s the Frozen Dead Guy all about?It has a lot to do with Cryonics, which is pretty much freezing people who are about to die, in hopes that future technology will be able to “re-animate” them and cure what ailed them.It had a lot to do with the Town of Nederland and the Nederland Chamber of Commerce….and there’s a year round Information Center in Ned for souvenirs of the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival (see below). The Chamber’s site had all the information on upcoming FDGDaze…..but in 2011 they sold the festival to a private group who now has the only site with information on the upcoming festival. Frozen Dead Guy Days is their link.It has a big connection to Norway, as the Grandson of the FDG, Trygve, lives there with his Mother, Aud (FDG’s Daughter). They are the ones responsible for maintaining the financials and micro-managing from afar. Trygve was deported in 1994 and has not set foot in the US since. Aud has visited…once. THere are long and curious tales about both of these situations, but suffice to say, neither is allowed back in the country at this time.There’s some of that old history……Psychics and all, found in the Historical Archives of the Planetary Ecologists at….There’s some history regarding the Great Unappearance on the Jay Leno Tonight Show..Here’s some archived video of the days when Grandpa was persona non grata…..Although there is a wild and entertaining side to this story…..there is also a serious and scientific side, too.There’s been some Press…….and some websites, like Dark DestinationsEven a local company who went National has played a part….Tuff Shed has made it all possible from a practical point of view.We celebrated Grandpa Bredo’s 107th Birthday with an Ice Run Party at the old International Cryonics Institute, before it was dismantled.********Update…..September 2012******* In September of 2012, a labor dispute broke out and when overseas management and local labor couldn’t agree on terms, a walkout ensued. The International Cryonics Institute was kicked out of it’s offices and had to remove all their equipment. Scabs were hired and the fate of Grandpa Bredo now rests in the hands of some guy and a truck. The coming winter is predicted to be snowy and cold. Stay tuned for further info…. The Iceman’s last day on the job…Here’s a wordle from the book “Chronicles of the Colorado Iceman”….And then there’s the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival…..Frozen Dead Guy Days 2006 Frozen Dead Guy Daze of 2007…..a festival to remember!Frozen Dead guy Days of 2008…A picture GalleryFrozen Dead Guy Daze 2009…Frozen Dead Guy Daze 2010…Re-animated Tours!If, after perusing this evolving site, you have any questions or still just can’t seem to figure out what the FDG is all about…Feel free to Send your query to The IcemanThis Page is deep in the throes of Creative Endeavour…….please be advised

An estimated 2,500 bodies around the world have been frozen in the hope of some future resurrection.

Robert Ettinger, the father of cryogenics, who introduced the concept in 1962.

If you have around US$90,000 to spare and are of a gambling disposition, perhaps your final journey should be to Australia. A company called Southern Cryonics is looking to open a facility in New South Wales this year that will allow its customers to freeze their bodies after death in the hope of one day being resurrected. If it goes ahead, it will make Australia only the third country, after the US and Russia, where such a service is available.

But, especially for those of a futurist bent perhaps, its as valid a thing to do with ones body as burial or cremation. Last year, a terminally ill 14-year-old girl in the UK became the first and only child so far to undergo the cryonic process. This is technically not freezing but vitrification, in which the body is treated with chemicals and chilled to super-cold temperatures so that molecules are locked in place and a solid is formed. An estimated 2,500 bodies around the world are now stored in this condition.

Supporters concede that the technology to revive the infinitely complex interactions between those molecules may never exist, but are nonetheless hopeful, pointing to shifting conceptions of what irreversible death actually is. If, for example, cessation of a heartbeat used to define it, now hearts can be re-started todays corpse may be tomorrows patient. They point to experiments such as that announced last year by 21st Century Medicine, which claimed to have successfully vitrified and recovered an entire mammalian brain for the first time, with the thawed rabbits brain found to have all of its synapses, cell membranes and intracellular structures intact.

Its not just cryonics. Stem-cell research, nano-tech, cloning, the science just keeps plugging away towards a future [of reanimating] that may or may not come to exist, says an upfront Dennis Kowalski, president of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute. His company was launched just over 40 years ago to provide cryostasis services. Lots of things considered impossible not long ago are possible today, so we just dont know how cryonics will work out. For people who use the service its really a case of theres nothing to lose.

Naturally, not everyone is hopeful that such processes will ever work out for those in the chiller. The problem with cryonics is that the perception of it is largely shaped by companies offering a service based on something completely unproven, says Joo Pedro De Magalhes, biologist and principal investigator into life extension at the University of Liverpool, UK, and co-founder of the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Network. Youre talking about a fairly eccentric procedure that only a few people have signed up to and into which little reported research is being done. That said, I think the people providing these services do believe theres a chance it may work one day, although I would have to say theyre optimistic.

But this is not to say that living longer wont, in time, prove possible as a result of some other method; just that arguably this is more likely to be based around preserving a life that has not experienced death, rather than the promise of reanimating one after its demise. The chasm between the two is all the more pronounced given neurosciences still scant ideas as to what consciousness or mind is, let alone how it might be saved and rebooted; would the warmed and reanimated you be the you that died, or a mere simulacrum? Your body may well not be the same: many of those opting for cryo-preservation go for the freezing of just their brains.

Certainly while cryonics specifically may remain a largely unexplored field, Google is now investing in anti-ageing science, an area that, as De Magalhes puts it, now has fewer crackpots and more reputable scientists working in it, with stronger science behind it too. Indeed, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in his best-selling book Homo Deus, humanisms status as contemporary societys new religion of choice, combined with technological advances, makes some form of greatly extended lifespan inevitable for some generation to come. Whether this will be by melding man and machine, by genetic manipulation, by a form of existence in cyberspace or some other fix can only be speculated at, but everything about our civilisations recent development points to it becoming a reality.

Advances in medicine, after all, have greatly extended average longevity over the last century alone. With this has come a shift in perspective that sees death less as the natural end point to a life so much as a process of disease that could, and perhaps should, be tackled like any other disease that threatens existence. De Magalhes points out that for many working in the field it is less about the pursuit of immortality as of improved health.

After all, its not self-evident that we all want to live forever, and there are philosophical arguments for the idea that death is good, that its necessary to appreciate life, he says. But it is self-evident that nobody wants Alzheimers, for example. If you focus on retarding the problems of ageing then inevitably were going to live longer. The longevity we have now isnt normal; its already better than what we had not long ago. Extrapolate that to the future and in a century the length of time we live now might be considered pretty bad. One can envisage a time when we might live, if not forever, then perhaps thousands of years so much longer than we live now that it might feel like forever.

That, naturally, would bring with it profound changes to the way in which we perceive ourselves and to how the world operates and all the more so if living considerably longer became a possibility faster than society was able to inculcate the notion. How would such a long lifespan affect our sense of self? Would institutions and mores such as lifelong marriage and monogamy remain the norm? When would we retire? How would our relationships with the many subsequent generations of our family be shaped? How would population growth be managed? How would such long lives be funded?

Such questions are, for sure, of no concern to those currently in cryostasis. These people tend to be into sci-fi, and into science too, suggests Kowalski, who has signed up himself, his wife and children for cryonic services when the time comes. I think for a lot of them its not necessarily about the fear of death. Its more a fascination with the future. Theyre optimistic about what it will bring. Theyre more Star Trek than Terminator.

The dead bodies of cryogenically frozen people and pets, DNA samples, and even organs, such as brains, might soon be sent to space. Russia’s first and only cryonics company,KrioRus, announced an agreement with Space Technologies, a new science and tech consortium.

Satellites with cryo-capsules will be launched into orbit by Russian rockets, said Yulia Arkhipova, general director ofSpace Technologies.

Cryogenics facilities exist only in the U.S. and Russia. Since 2005,KrioRushas frozen the bodies and brains of 54 people, eight dogs, nine cats,three birds, and even one pet chinchilla. According to the company, many frozen individuals once had the aspiration to go to space.

Arkhipova didnt provide details on whether her company has partnerships with established Russian space organizations. Space Technologies was registered in 2016 and it doesnt have its own rocket fleet or launch vehicles. The company hasnt yet implemented a single space project but already announced ambitious plans, such as the creation ofRussia’sfirst private cosmodrome and a new orbital station,MIR-2.

The cryo-capsules wont be just hanging about in orbit, Arkipova promised. The company is planning to develop satellites for in-orbit repairs but, once again, Arkhipova didnt provide any details. The leading Russian space companies are developing these satellites, the technologies are unique and its classified information, Arkipova said.

The names of these leading space companies are classified, as well as the names of the organization’s founders. Space Technologies declined to respond to these questions.

Freezing bodies and cryogenic experiments might be necessary for the future development of space travel to distant planets or galaxies.

Cryogenic freezing is the process of preserving a dead body with liquid nitrogen. Currently, it can only happen at the moment when someone has just been declared dead. The freezing process must begin as soon as the patient dies in order to preventbraindamage.

First, the body is cooled in an ice bath to gradually reduce its temperature, and then doctors drain the blood and replace it with an anti-freeze fluid to stop harmful ice crystals forming.

People who make the decision to freeze their bodies believe scientists will one day in the future figure out how to warm up the body and bring them back to life. Hopefully by that time doctors will be able to cure cancer and other illness.

According to KrioRus, the cost of preserving a body in space starts from $250,000. Space Technologies didnt clarify the costs of launching a body into orbit.

Cryonics is the practice ofdeep-freezing recently deceased bodies(or even justthe brains of thosewho have recently died)in the hopes of one day reviving them.

It has been the subject of serious scientific exploration and study – as well as a fair share of pseudoscience, lore, and myth. Fictional accounts like Batman’s Iceman, and the (untrue) rumours of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen have cast a speculative shadow over the field of cryonics.

Butrecently, for the first time ever in China,a woman has been cryogenically frozen. Zhan Wenlian died at the age of 49 from lung cancer and her husband, Gui Junmin, “volunteered” her for the cryonic procedure.

Bothhe and his late wife wanted to donate her body to science to “give back to society.” He told TheMirror UKthat hewas initially “pitched”the idea of cryonicswith it being described as a “life preservation project”.

This procedure – which has Wenlian’s body restingface downin 2,000 litres of liquid nitrogen – was completed at theYinfeng Biological Group in Jinan.

This project is the collaborative effortof the Yinfeng Biological Group, Qilu Hospital Shandong University and consultants fromAlcor Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit cryonics company based in the United States.

Even with all the faith many have in the procedure, the question remains: how scientifically possible is a project like this? Is this just an experiment to allow us to better understand human biology, orcould cryonics one day become a feasible option?

Cryonics isall about timing.The bodies of the deceased arecryogenically frozenimmediately after the heartstops beating.”Freezing” is a bit of a misleading term, because cryonic freezing is actually very specifically trying toavoidice crystal formation – which damages the cells of the body’s tissues.

Rapid cooling, rather than freezing, is a more accuratedescription of the process.

A chemical cocktail of preservatives likeglycerol andpropandiol, in addition to antifreeze agents, are commonly used to get the body into a stable state where it won’t be decaying, but also won’t suffer damage from being stored at low temperatures for, conceivably, a very long time.

From there, the bodiesare given specific care that caters to the idea that death is a continuing process; one that can ultimately be reversed.

The aim of cryonic preservation would be to one day be able to thaw the bodies and reanimate them at a cellular level – preferably without too many epigenetic changes.

“I tend to believe in new and emerging technologies, so I think it will be completely possible to revive her.”

With ourcurrent understanding and technology, this process of reversingdeath so completely is just not possible. The closest kind of revival we have are themoments after clinical death where patients are revived by something such as cardiac defibrillation.

Cryonics acts within this critical, albeit brief, period as well- but works within the belief that death is a grey area. More of a processrather than a definite, final, event.

Just because we haven’t succeeded in reviving the dead yetdoesn’t mean the field of cryonics isunnecessary or unimportant.This case inChina is a step forward for everyone researchingthe field of cryonics- and those of us who hope to benefit from advancements in it.

We may not be able to reverse death just yet,but it doesn’t seem outof the realm of possibility to imagine that, withsuch wild scientific advancements underway, technology could one day allow it to be possible.

Whether or not it does in our lifetimes, this most recent development is certainly an interesting one.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

Cryonics is the practice ofdeep-freezing recently deceased bodies(or even justthe brains of thosewho have recently died)in the hopes of one day reviving them.

It has been the subject of serious scientific exploration and study as well as a fair share of pseudoscience, lore, and myth. Fictional accounts like Batmans Iceman, and the (untrue) rumours of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen have cast a speculative shadow over the field of cryonics.

Butrecently, for the first time ever in China,a woman has been cryogenically frozen. Zhan Wenlian died at the age of 49 from lung cancer and her husband, Gui Junmin, volunteered her for the cryonic procedure.

Bothhe and his late wife wanted to donate her body to science to give back to society. He told TheMirror UKthat hewas initially pitchedthe idea of cryonicswith it being described as a life preservation project.

This procedure which has Wenlians body restingface downin 2,000 litres of liquid nitrogen was completed at theYinfeng Biological Group in Jinan.

This project is the collaborative effortof the Yinfeng Biological Group, Qilu Hospital Shandong University and consultants fromAlcor Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit cryonics company based in the United States.

Even with all the faith many have in the procedure, the question remains: how scientifically possible is a project like this? Is this just an experiment to allow us to better understand human biology, orcould cryonics one day become a feasible option?

Cryonics isall about timing.The bodies of the deceased arecryogenically frozenimmediately after the heartstops beating.Freezing is a bit of a misleading term, because cryonic freezing is actually very specifically trying toavoidice crystal formation which damages the cells of the bodys tissues.

Rapid cooling, rather than freezing, is a more accuratedescription of the process.

A chemical cocktail of preservatives likeglycerol andpropandiol, in addition to antifreeze agents, are commonly used to get the body into a stable state where it wont be decaying, but also wont suffer damage from being stored at low temperatures for, conceivably, a very long time.

From there, the bodiesare given specific care that caters to the idea that death is a continuing process; one that can ultimately be reversed.

The aim of cryonic preservation would be to one day be able to thaw the bodies and reanimate them at a cellular level preferably without too many epigenetic changes.

I tend to believe in new and emerging technologies, so I think it will be completely possible to revive her.

With ourcurrent understanding and technology, this process of reversingdeath so completely is just not possible. The closest kind of revival we have are themoments after clinical death where patients are revived by something such as cardiac defibrillation.

Cryonics acts within this critical, albeit brief, period as well but works within the belief that death is a grey area. More of a processrather than a definite, final, event.

Just because we havent succeeded in reviving the dead yetdoesnt mean the field of cryonics isunnecessary or unimportant.This case inChina is a step forward for everyone researchingthe field of cryonics and those of us who hope to benefit from advancements in it.

We may not be able to reverse death just yet,but it doesnt seem outof the realm of possibility to imagine that, withsuch wild scientific advancements underway, technology could one day allow it to be possible.

Whether or not it does in our lifetimes, this most recent development is certainly an interesting one.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

If you have around US$90,000 (S$122,733) to spare and are of a gambling disposition, perhaps your final journey should be to Australia. A company called Southern Cryonics is looking to open a facility in New South Wales this year that will allow its customers to ‘freeze’ their bodies after death in the hope of one day being resurrected. If it goes ahead, it will make Australia only the third country, after the US and Russia, where such a service is available.

But, especially for those of a futurist bent perhaps, it’s as valid a thing to do with one’s body as burial or cremation. Last year, a terminally ill 14-year-old girl in the UK became the first and only child so far to undergo the cryonic process. This is technically not freezing but vitrification, in which the body is treated with chemicals and chilled to super-cold temperatures so that molecules are locked in place and a solid is formed. An estimated 2,500 bodies around the world are now stored in this condition.

Supporters concede that the technology to revive the infinitely complex interactions between those molecules may never exist, but are nonetheless hopeful, pointing to shifting conceptions of what irreversible death actually is. If, for example, cessation of a heartbeat used to define it, now hearts can be re-started – today’s corpse may be tomorrow’s patient. They point to experiments such as that announced last year by 21st Century Medicine, which claimed to have successfully vitrified and recovered an entire mammalian brain for the first time, with the thawed rabbit’s brain found to have all of its synapses, cell membranes and intracellular structures intact.

“It’s not just cryonics. Stem-cell research, nano-tech, cloning, the science just keeps plugging away towards a future [of reanimating] that may or may not come to exist,” says an upfront Dennis Kowalski, president of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute. His company was launched just over 40 years ago to provide cryostasis services. “Lots of things considered impossible not long ago are possible today, so we just don’t know how cryonics will work out. For people who use the service it’s really a case of there’s nothing to lose.”

Naturally, not everyone is hopeful that such processes will ever work out for those in the chiller. “The problem with cryonics is that the perception of it is largely shaped by companies offering a service based on something completely unproven,” says Joo Pedro De Magalhes, biologist and principal investigator into life extension at the University of Liverpool, UK, and co-founder of the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Network. “You’re talking about a fairly eccentric procedure that only a few people have signed up to and into which little reported research is being done. That said, I think the people providing these services do believe there’s a chance it may work one day, although I would have to say they’re optimistic.”

But this is not to say that living longer won’t, in time, prove possible as a result of some other method; just that arguably this is more likely to be based around preserving a life that has not experienced death, rather than the promise of reanimating one after its demise. The chasm between the two is all the more pronounced given neuroscience’s still scant ideas as to what consciousness or mind is, let alone how it might be saved and rebooted; would the warmed and reanimated you be the you that died, or a mere simulacrum? Your body may well not be the same: many of those opting for cryo-preservation go for the ‘freezing’ of just their brains.

Certainly while cryonics specifically may remain a largely unexplored field, Google is now investing in anti-ageing science, an area that, as De Magalhes puts it, “now has fewer crackpots and more reputable scientists working in it, with stronger science behind it too”. Indeed, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in his best-selling book Homo Deus, humanism’s status as contemporary society’s new religion of choice, combined with technological advances, makes some form of greatly extended lifespan inevitable for some generation to come. Whether this will be by melding man and machine, by genetic manipulation, by a form of existence in cyberspace or some other fix can only be speculated at, but everything about our civilisation’s recent development points to it becoming a reality.

Advances in medicine, after all, have greatly extended average longevity over the last century alone. With this has come a shift in perspective that sees death less as the natural end point to a life so much as a process of disease that could, and perhaps should, be tackled like any other disease that threatens existence. De Magalhes points out that for many working in the field it is less about the pursuit of immortality as of improved health.

“After all, it’s not self-evident that we all want to live forever, and there are philosophical arguments for the idea that death is good, that it’s necessary to appreciate life,” he says. “But it is self-evident that nobody wants Alzheimer’s, for example. If you focus on retarding the problems of ageing then inevitably we’re going to live longer. The longevity we have now isn’t ‘normal’; it’s already better than what we had not long ago. Extrapolate that to the future and in a century the length of time we live now might be considered pretty bad. One can envisage a time when we might live, if not forever, then perhaps thousands of years – so much longer than we live now that it might feel like forever.”

That, naturally, would bring with it profound changes to the way in which we perceive ourselves and to how the world operates and all the more so if living considerably longer became a possibility faster than society was able to inculcate the notion. How would such a long lifespan affect our sense of self? Would institutions and mores such as lifelong marriage and monogamy remain the norm? When would we retire? How would our relationships with the many subsequent generations of our family be shaped? How would population growth be managed? How would such long lives be funded?

Such questions are, for sure, of no concern to those currently in cryostasis. “These people tend to be into sci-fi, and into science too,” suggests Kowalski, who has signed up himself, his wife and children for cryonic services when the time comes. “I think for a lot of them it’s not necessarily about the fear of death. It’s more a fascination with the future. They’re optimistic about what it will bring. They’re more Star Trek than Terminator.”

Cryonics is the practice of deep-freezing recently deceased bodies(or even just the brains of those who have recently died)in the hopes of one day reviving them. It has been the subject of serious scientific exploration and study as well as a fair share of pseudoscience, lore, and myth. Fictional accounts like Batmans Iceman, and the (untrue) rumors of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen have, unfortunately, cast a speculative shadow over the field of cryonics.

But recently, for the first time ever in China, a woman has been cryogenically frozen. Zhan Wenlian died at the age of 49 from lung cancer and her husband, Gui Junmin, volunteered her for the cryonic procedure. Bothhe and his late wife wanted to donate her body to science to give back to society. He told Mirror UKthat hewas initially pitched the idea of cryonics with it being described as a life preservation project.

This procedure which has Wenlians body restingfacedownin 2,000 liters of liquid nitrogen was completed at theYinfeng Biological Group in Jinan. This project is the collaborative effortof the Yinfeng Biological Group, Qilu Hospital Shandong University and consultants from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit cryonics company based in the United States.

Even with all the faith many have in the procedure, the question remains: how scientifically possible is a project like this? Is this just an experiment to allow us to better understand human biology, orcould cryonics one day become a feasible option?

Cryonics is all about timing.The bodies of the deceased arecryogenically frozenimmediately after the heartstops beating. Freezing is a bit of a misleading term, because cryonic freezing is actually very specifically trying toavoidice crystal formation which damages the cells of the bodys tissues. Rapid cooling, rather than freezing, is a more accuratedescription of the process. A chemical cocktail of preservatives likeglycerol andpropandiol, in addition to antifreeze agents, are commonly used to get the body into a stable state where it wont be decaying, but also wont suffer damage from being stored at low temperatures for, conceivably, a very long time.

From there, the bodiesare given specific care that caters to the idea that death is a continuing process; one that can ultimately be reversed. The aim of cryonic preservation would be to one day be able to thaw the bodies and reanimate them at a cellular level preferably without too many epigenetic changes.

I tend to believe in new and emerging technologies, so I think it will be completely possible to revive her.

With ourcurrent understanding and technology, this process of reversingdeath so completely is just not possible. The closest kind of revival we have are themoments after clinical death where patients are revived by something such as cardiac defibrillation. Cryonics acts within this critical, albeit brief, period as well but works within the belief that death is a grey area. More of a processrather than a definite, final, event.

Just because we havent succeeded in reviving the dead yetdoesnt mean the field of cryonics isunnecessary or unimportant.This first case inChina is a major step forward for everyone researching inthe field of cryonics and those of us who may, one day, hope to benefit from advancements in it.

We may not be able to reverse death just yet,but it doesnt seem outof the realm of possibility to imagine that, with such wild scientific advancements underway, technology could one day allow it to be possible. Whether or not it does in our lifetimes, this most recent development is certainly a positive one.

Humans have wanted to live forever for as long as we’ve lived at all. It’s an obsession that stretches back so far that it feels like it’s somehow hard-coded into our DNA. Over the years, immortality (to a greater or lesser extent) has been promised by everyone from religions and cults to the cosmetics industry, big tech companies and questionable food blogs.

It’s also a staple of fiction, all the way back to the earliest surviving great work of literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, carved onto stone tablets in 2100 BC, depicts its titular king hunting for the secret of eternal life, which he finds in a plant that lives at at the bottom of the sea. He collects the plant by roping stones to his feet, but then a snake steals it while he’s having a pre-immortality bath. Gilgamesh has a little cry, then gives up.

A cuneiform tablet containing part of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The reason why we age is still the subject of major scientific debate, but it basically boils down to damage accumulating in our cells throughout our lives, which eventually kills us. By slowing that damage – first by making tools, then controlling fire, inventing writing, trade, agriculture, logic, the scientific method, the industrial revolution, democracy and so on, we’ve managed to massively increase human life expectancy.

There’s a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don’t. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening. Human lifespan has been lengthening at a constant rate of about two years per decade for the last 200 years. If we can speed that up past the rate at which we age then we hit what futurist Aubrey de Grey calls “longevity escape velocity” – the point we become immortal.

There’s a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don’t. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening.

That all sounds rather easy, and of course it’s not quite that simple. It’s all we can do at the moment to keep up with the Moore’s Law of increasing lifespans. But with a major research effort, coordinated around the world, who knows? Scientific history is filled with fields that ticked along slowly and then suddenly, massively, accelerated. Computer science is one. Genetics is another recent example.

To understand what we need to do to hit longevity escape velocity, it’s worth looking at how life expectancy has increased in recent history. The late statistician Hans Rosling made a powerful case that average lifespans rise alongside per capita income. Take a couple of minutes to watch this video and you’ll be convinced:

Reducing the gap between the global rich and poor, therefore, is probably the fastest way to boost the world average life expectancy figure, but it’s limited. And it won’t do much for people in rich countries.

To boost the lifespans of the people living in countries that are already pretty wealthy, we need to look closer at the countries that are forecast to have the highest life expectancies in the coming years. A study published earlier this year in the Lancet shows what life expectancy might look like in 2030 in 35 industrialised countries, using an amalgamation of 21 different forecasting models.

South Korea tops the chart with women living on average beyond 90, while France, Japan, Switzerland and Australia are not far behind. Most of the countries at the top of the chart have high-quality healthcare provision, low infant deaths, and low smoking and road traffic injury rates. Fewer people are overweight or obese. The US, meanwhile, is projected to see only a modest rise – due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.

The study results are interesting, not only because they’re the best possible guess at our future but because they clearly show how social policies make a massive difference to how long people live. There are unknowns, of course – no-one could have predicted the 80s AIDS epidemic, for example, and no doubt further pandemics lurk in humanity’s future. But ban smoking, fight obesity, and introduce autonomous cars and personalised medicine, and you’ll see lifespans rise.

The US is projected to see only a modest rise in lifespan – due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.

The other interesting thing is that the study’s results are a shot across the bows of scientists who claim that there are hard limits to human lifespan.

“As recently as the turn of the century, many researchers believed that life expectancy would never surpass 90 years, lead author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told the Guardian back in February.

That prediction mirrors another, published in Nature in October 2016, that concluded that the upper limit of human age is stuck at about 115 years.

“By analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the worlds oldest person has not increased since the 1990s,” wrote the authors – Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland & Jan Vijg.

“Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.”

The maximum length of a human lifespan remains up for debate.

Other researchers, however, disagree. Bryan G. Hughes & Siegfried Hekimi wrote in the same journal a few months later that their analysis showed that there are many possible maximum lifespan trajectories.

We just dont know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future, Hekimi said.

Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy.

That’s all big-picture stuff, so let’s dive down to a more personal level. Assuming that you can’t change your genetics or your life up until the point that you’re currently at, what can you personally do to live longer?

Here’s the list: Don’t smoke. Exercise your body and mind on a daily basis. Eat foods rich in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and unsaturated fat. Don’t drink too much alcohol. Get your blood pressure checked. Chop out sources of stress and anxiety in your life. Travel by train. Stay in school. Think positive. Cultivate a strong social group. Don’t sit for long periods of time. Make sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D. Keep your weight at a healthy level. And don’t go to hospital if you can help it – hospitals are dangerous places.

All of those things have been correlated with increased lifespan in scientific studies. And they’re all pretty easy and cheap to do. If you want to maximise your longevity, then that’s your to-do list. But there are also strategies that have a little less scientific merit. The ones that people with too much money pursue when they realise they haven’t been following any of the above for most of their life.

Inside the Cryonics Institute.

Cryonics is probably the most popular. First proposed in the 1960s by US academic Robert Ettinger in his book “The Prospect of Immortality”, it involves freezing the body as soon as possible after death in a tube kept at -196C, along with detailed notes of what they died of. The idea is that when medicine has invented a cure for that ailment, the corpse can be thawed and reanimated.

Calling someone dead is merely medicines way of excusing itself from resuscitation problems it cannot fix today, reads the website of top cryogenics firm Alcor.

The problem is the brain. First, it’s so dense and well-protected that it’s extremely difficult for the cryonics chemicals to penetrate it. It’s almost impossible that it doesn’t get damaged in the freezing process.

The 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it’ll be a while until we have the computational resources to map it.

Secondly, your neurons die quickly – even if you’re immersed within minutes of death, you’re still likely to suffer substantial brain damage. To which cryonics proponents argue: “What do I have to lose?” If the choice is between probably never waking up again and never waking up again, and it’s your money to spend, then why not give it a shot?

An alternative to deep freeze is storing your brain in a computer. Not literally a lump of grey matter, but a database detailing in full all of the connections between the neurons in your brain that make you you (known as your connectome). Future doctors could then either rewire a real or artificial brain to match that data, resurrecting you in a new body (or perhaps even as an artificial intelligence).

A close look at a slice of mouse brain. Credit: Robert Cudmore

So far, we’ve only managed to map the full connectome of one animal – the roundworm C. elegans. Despite the worm’s mere 302 neurons and 7,500 or so synapses, the resulting data is about 12GB in size – you can download it in full at the Open Connectome Project, and even install it in a robot, which will then act like a worm.

Unfortunately the human brain is a somewhat larger undertaking. The Human Connectome Project is making a start, and AI is helping, but the 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it’ll be a while until we have the computational resources to get it done. It’s worth noting that this isn’t an unassailable goal, especially if we can somehow figure out which bits are actually important to our personality and who we are as individuals and which bits are just used to remember the lyrics of Spice Girls songs.

For now, though, my recommendation would be to stick to the list of simple life extension strategies above. It’s probable that in time we’ll have new ways of augmenting our bodies that will extend our lifespans (we’ve already started with cyborg technology – just look at pacemakers and artificial hips).

But if you want to be at the front of the waiting list then you’ll need to arrive at that point with as youthful a body as possible.

If you have around US$90,000 to spare and are of a gambling disposition, perhaps your final journey should be to Australia. A company called Southern Cryonics is looking to open a facility in New South Wales this year that will allow its customers to freeze their bodies after death in the hope of one day being resurrected. If it goes ahead, it will make Australia only the third country, after the US and Russia, where such a service is available.

But, especially for those of a futurist bent perhaps, its as valid a thing to do with ones body as burial or cremation. Last year, a terminally ill 14-year-old girl in the UK became the first and only child so far to undergo the cryonic process. This is technically not freezing but vitrification, in which the body is treated with chemicals and chilled to super-cold temperatures so that molecules are locked in place and a solid is formed. An estimated 2,500 bodies around the world are now stored in this condition.

Supporters concede that the technology to revive the infinitely complex interactions between those molecules may never exist, but are nonetheless hopeful, pointing to shifting conceptions of what irreversible death actually is. If, for example, cessation of a heartbeat used to define it, now hearts can be re-started todays corpse may be tomorrows patient. They point to experiments such as that announced last year by 21st Century Medicine, which claimed to have successfully vitrified and recovered an entire mammalian brain for the first time, with the thawed rabbits brain found to have all of its synapses, cell membranes and intracellular structures intact.

Its not just cryonics. Stem-cell research, nano-tech, cloning, the science just keeps plugging away towards a future [of reanimating] that may or may not come to exist, says an upfront Dennis Kowalski, president of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute. His company was launched just over 40 years ago to provide cryostasis services. Lots of things considered impossible not long ago are possible today, so we just dont know how cryonics will work out. For people who use the service its really a case of theres nothing to lose.

Naturally, not everyone is hopeful that such processes will ever work out for those in the chiller. The problem with cryonics is that the perception of it is largely shaped by companies offering a service based on something completely unproven, says Joo Pedro De Magalhes, biologist and principal investigator into life extension at the University of Liverpool, UK, and co-founder of the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Network. Youre talking about a fairly eccentric procedure that only a few people have signed up to and into which little reported research is being done. That said, I think the people providing these services do believe theres a chance it may work one day, although I would have to say theyre optimistic.

But this is not to say that living longer wont, in time, prove possible as a result of some other method; just that arguably this is more likely to be based around preserving a life that has not experienced death, rather than the promise of reanimating one after its demise. The chasm between the two is all the more pronounced given neurosciences still scant ideas as to what consciousness or mind is, let alone how it might be saved and rebooted; would the warmed and reanimated you be the you that died, or a mere simulacrum? Your body may well not be the same: many of those opting for cryo-preservation go for the freezing of just their brains.

Certainly while cryonics specifically may remain a largely unexplored field, Google is now investing in anti-ageing science, an area that, as De Magalhes puts it, now has fewer crackpots and more reputable scientists working in it, with stronger science behind it too. Indeed, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in his best-selling book Homo Deus, humanisms status as contemporary societys new religion of choice, combined with technological advances, makes some form of greatly extended lifespan inevitable for some generation to come. Whether this will be by melding man and machine, by genetic manipulation, by a form of existence in cyberspace or some other fix can only be speculated at, but everything about our civilisations recent development points to it becoming a reality.

Advances in medicine, after all, have greatly extended average longevity over the last century alone. With this has come a shift in perspective that sees death less as the natural end point to a life so much as a process of disease that could, and perhaps should, be tackled like any other disease that threatens existence. De Magalhes points out that for many working in the field it is less about the pursuit of immortality as of improved health.

After all, its not self-evident that we all want to live forever, and there are philosophical arguments for the idea that death is good, that its necessary to appreciate life, he says. But it is self-evident that nobody wants Alzheimers, for example. If you focus on retarding the problems of ageing then inevitably were going to live longer. The longevity we have now isnt normal; its already better than what we had not long ago. Extrapolate that to the future and in a century the length of time we live now might be considered pretty bad. One can envisage a time when we might live, if not forever, then perhaps thousands of years so much longer than we live now that it might feel like forever.

That, naturally, would bring with it profound changes to the way in which we perceive ourselves and to how the world operates and all the more so if living considerably longer became a possibility faster than society was able to inculcate the notion. How would such a long lifespan affect our sense of self? Would institutions and mores such as lifelong marriage and monogamy remain the norm? When would we retire? How would our relationships with the many subsequent generations of our family be shaped? How would population growth be managed? How would such long lives be funded?

Such questions are, for sure, of no concern to those currently in cryostasis. These people tend to be into sci-fi, and into science too, suggests Kowalski, who has signed up himself, his wife and children for cryonic services when the time comes. I think for a lot of them its not necessarily about the fear of death. Its more a fascination with the future. Theyre optimistic about what it will bring. Theyre more Star Trek than Terminator.

I recently did a presentation at the Museum of Military History in Kissimmee, Florida, about Disney and World War II. During the question-and-answer session, I was asked if I actually believed Walt was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Glendale, because they had heard from a reliable source “that worked at Disney” that it was obvious he was frozen.

I was even asked about this during a question-and-answer session after a presentation I did at the Walt Disney Family Museum a few years ago about Disney and outer space.

It is a question I keep getting asked not out of idle curiosity, but because the person often wants to prove that they know this “secret fact” and if I am simply a Disney apologist who only promotes the official Disney line.

First, it is always challenging to try to prove a negative to the satisfaction of all people.

Second, just the mere mention of these falsehoods about Walt continues to give them additional life, with people claiming they saw this assertion in a book or heard it somewhere, like from a Disney cast member, so it must be true.

Finally, there will be people who despite common sense and all the evidence to the contrary will condescendingly assume that where there is smoke, there must be fire, or that someone is trying to cover-up the real story.

The one image that sticks in my mind when someone asks me if Walt were frozen is the memory of his oldest daughter Diane Disney Miller. I remember her telling me with a mixture of sadness and anger in her face and voice about how upsetting it was to the Disney family over the years for this question to even be asked in the first place.

She told me that one of the reasons she was so adamant about creating the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco was “Other little kids would say to my kids, ‘Your grandfather is frozen, isn’t he?’ And I just couldn’t let that stand. What if someone said that about their parent? How would they feel?”

When I lived in California, some California Institute of the Arts students as an art project raised some money by producing a limited amount of “Waltsickles” that featured a full-figured model of Walt Disney in a suit inside of a popsickle. That never happened again although gags about “Disney on Ice” with Walt frozen in a block of ice and skaters performing on top of him abound.

An editorial cartoon jokingly referred to Disney on Ice as being Walt frozen in ice.

Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen, but was cremated on December 17, 1966. Rumors still persist that Walt was put into cryogenic suspension and buried somewhere underneath Disneyland, in particular under the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, since it was still under construction when he died.

However, I have had people tell me, he was put under the dedication plaque on Main Street or directly in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Interestingly, I haven’t yet had anyone tell me Walt’s supposed frozen body is somewhere in the Haunted Mansion. I guess that is because the Mansion is supposed to be for dead people and in theory, if he were frozen, Walt would still be alive.

Articles and books about the preservation of animal tissue through freezing appeared in medical and scientific journals and occasionally the general press starting in the late 1950s. Perhaps the most prominent book during Walt’s lifetime, The Prospect of Immortality by Robert C.W. Ettinger, was published in 1964.

However, this book still discussed cryonics as merely theoretical although eventually possible. Just as it was possible Walt “might” have heard about this topic, but there is no documentation that he ever did. Neither his family nor his closest associates ever heard him talk about the topicand Walt talked about everything he was interested in at the moment.

Certainly, there are several untrustworthy and unreliable sources that have proposed that he did but there is no evidence, including interviews with those who actually knew and worked with Walt.

Again, this is one of those Walt Disney Urban Legends that “everyone knows” but nobody seems to know where the information originated.

Waking Walt was a novel published in 2002 by former Disneyland and Walt Disney World Vice-President Larry Pontius about Walt Disney supposedly being defrosted by a very small group of former confidants to save the Disney Company from the machinations of Michael Eisner.

It is no surprise that Walt’s disgust about what has happened to his dream, especially Epcot, is clearly apparent in the novel. Pontinus never knew Walt, but worked as a Disney marketing executive from 1976-1982.

Diane Disney Miller asserted in 1972: “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics.”

Walt’s official death certificate clearly shows that his body was cremated at Forest Lawn Glendale on December 17, 1966. The name, license number and signature of the embalmer, Dean Fluss, are those of a real embalmer who worked at the mortuary at the time. Court papers show that the Disney family paid $40,000 to Forest Lawn for the interment location of his ashes.

Certainly, Walt did not like attending funerals and even avoided the ones for his own father and brother.

“He never goes to a funeral if he can help it,” wrote Diane in 1956. “If he had to go to one it plunges him into a reverie which lasts for hours after he’s home. At such times he says, ‘When I’m dead I don’t want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive’.”

Walt did not want people to see him in the hospital, and so only the immediate family was allowed into his room. Very few people, even those close to him, knew how really sick Walt actually was. The story told to the public was that he was undergoing surgery for an old neck injury from playing polo that most people knew had troubled him for decades and then re-entered the hospital days later for a routine post operative checkup.

Walt’s death was not immediately announced to the press until several hours after it occurred at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, December 15, 1966. Walt lay in his hospital bed for a few hours while his family arrived and said their farewells. If Walt was to be put into cryonic suspension, it would have had to be done immediately to preserve him or even just moments before his death. That did not happen.

He lay there as his daughter Diane tried to get her mother to hurry up to get to the hospital but Lillian kept delaying the inevitable. His older brother Roy sat at the edge of the bed rubbing one of Walt’s feet that was sticking out from the under the sheets. Walt had always complained his feet were cold in the hospital.

The cause of Disney’s death was initially announced as being “acute circulatory collapse” and, on the death certificate, “cardiac arrest,” which meant simply that his heart had stopped beating. It was a standard medical phrase giving no indication of what caused the heart to stop beating, which, in this case, was cancer. The cause was considered of secondary importance and to the general public the actual cause was unimportant. Walt Disney was gone.

Walt’s funeral was quietly held at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale at 5 p.m. on Friday, December 16, the day after his death. No funeral announcement was made until after it had taken place. Only immediate family members attended, no friends, people who worked at the studio or business associates.

The Disney characters and cast members mourn Walt Disney in this cartoon.

His widow Lillian; daughters Diane and Sharon, with their husbands (Ron Miller and Robert Brown); his brother Roy and his wife Edna; and their son, Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney, with his wife Patty, were the only ones there. His sister Ruth was told not to fly down from Portland, Oregon, where she lived for fear the press would follow her to the service.

The Los Angeles Times reported, “Secret rites were conducted at the Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn. The services were a closely-guarded secret. Family services were announced only after they had been concluded. Studio and cemetery officials refused to reveal details.”

Forest Lawn officials refused to disclose any details of the funeral or disposition of the body, stating only that “Mr. Disney’s wishes were very specific and had been spelled out in great detail.”

The situation that people were not fully aware how ill Walt was, never saw him in the hospital and how badly he had deteriorated, nor attended his funeral to see him lying in state sparked the speculation that like other popular celebrities who died somewhat suddenly, including Elvis Presley, Walt was not really dead.

While the Disney family were a private family and felt this was a private matter, others saw it as a mystery.

The origin of the rumor of Walt being frozen has often been credited to Disney Studios animators who “had a bizarre sense of humor” and perhaps the earliest known printed version appeared in the French magazine Ici Paris in 1969.

In 1985, I asked animator Ward Kimball if he was the source for the rumor since he was well known for his pranks. “When Disney fans ask me if it’s true that Walt’s body is kept frozen for future resurrection, I answer that question by pointing out that Walt was always intensely interested in things scientific and he, more than any person I knew, just might have been curious enough to agree to such an experiment.”

A decade earlier, Kimball had told another interviewer, “The smoking may have set the stage for his death. It probably weakened his physical condition. But I’m convinced it was the emotional stress he was under that killed him. It’s such a dull world. So when I am asked if Walt’s body was frozen and if he believed he could come back someday, just to stir things up I tell everybody he is frozen. Actually, he was cremated.”

in 1972, Bob Nelson, who was then the president of the Cryonics Society of California, gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times. He specifically stated that Walt was not cryogenically frozen and reaffirmed that he had been cremated. However, he continued that he felt that Walt wanted to be frozen and based it on the fact that he had been contacted by someone at the studios prior to Disney death that asked elaborate questions about the process, the facilities, the staff, and their history.

That someone may have been writer Charles Show, who had worked on the Tomorrowland episodes for the Disney television series and has admitted doing research on the topic before Walt’s death.

Nelson pointed out that the first cryonic suspension took place just a month after Disney’s death. Dr. James Bedford, a 73-year-old psychologist from Glendale, was suspended by Nelson and his team on January 12, 1967. Bedford has yet to be revived from his comfortable rest in Arizona.

“If Disney had been the first it would have made headlines around the world and been a real shot in the arm for cryonics,” said Nelson who had hoped to put Walt in a nitrogen filled capsule chilled to minus 371 degrees Fahrenheit. Interestingly, Nelson’s organization had its incorporation papers approved by the state of California on December 15, 1966, the same day Walt passed away.

Nelson was later asked if some other facility than his own might have been involved.

“There was no other facility at that time. The only other group was the Cryonics Society of New York and they had nothing no mortician, no doctor, no nothing,” Nelson said.

Author Ray Bradbury said later, “There was a rumor that (Walt) had been frozen in a cryogenic mortuary to be revived in later years. Nonsense! He’s alive now! People at the studio speak of him as if he were present! That’s immortality for you. Who needs cryonics?”

In the 1970s, the National Enquirer revealed the grave site of Walt Disney.

For nearly a year after the cremation, Walt Disney’s ashes remained un-interred. When Sharon’s husband, Bob Brown, died less than a year later, in September 1967, Sharon made the arrangements for her father and her husband to be interred together so that neither would be alone. She and her older sister, Diane, chose a remote plot outside the Freedom Mausoleum.

A modest bronze rectangular tablet on a wall lists the name of Walter Elias Disney; his wife, Lillian; his son-in-law, Robert Brown; and a mention that daughter Sharon’s ashes were “scattered in paradise.”

To locate the site, drive through the entrance to a road called Cathedral Drive. Stay on the road to the eastern edge of the park where Cathedral Drive intersects with Freedom Way. At that intersection, turn right onto Freedom Way. On your left will be trees, fountains, and statues. This area is called Freedom Court.

At the far end of Freedom Court is a large mausoleum. Pull over and park on the right-hand side of the street. There should be a “33” painted on the curb opposite your car, indicating 33 Freedom Way. Standing at the base of the steps leading to the main entrance of the Freedom Mausoleum, turn to your left and walk to the far edge of the steps.

There is a small, private, low-gated courtyard garden near the brick wall. Inside this area guarded by a hedge of orange olivias, red azaleas, and a holly tree there is a small statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid sitting on a rock.

In recent years, another huge falsehood has circulated in regards to Walt Disney’s death and I have no clue where this could have originated.

According to the myth, in Walt Disney’s Last Will and Testament dated March 1966, he stipulated that the first man to get pregnant or give birth would receive millions of dollars, all of Walt Disney World or even the entire Disney Company. The vagueness of the reward should be the first clue that this is bogus.

Walt Disney’s will is a public document and easily accessible so it is easy to see that no such statement exists or anything else like it relating to bizarre statement.

In addition, Walt was a highly conservative Midwest Christian and such a decree would certainly be out of character even for a man interested in innovation and the latest technology. In any case, this would not be something the traditional Walt would likely want to encourage at all nor did he ever discuss anything like it.

In any case, The Walt Disney Company was a publicly held corporation so Walt wouldn’t have been able to give away the company or Walt Disney World. He didn’t own them. In his will, Disney clearly left 45 percent of his estate to his wife and daughters and another 45 percent to be distributed primarily to California Institute of the Arts and the remaining 10 percent to be divided among his sister, nieces, and nephews.

So there were no extra millions of dollars to be distributed to any other bequest.

While there have been stories of eccentric wealthy people making unusual bequests in their wills, Walt never did.

However, even Walt knew that a good story is hard to extinguish and will often take on a life of its own. You might think that the information in this column is enough to put the story to rest but I can tell you that I shared this with an avid and somewhat knowledgeable Disney fan before publication and her immediate reaction was, “documents can be forged!”

I just sighed.

So the falsehoods will probably continue while the facts are forgotten. I just keep remembering how sad it made Diane Disney Miller and I wish there were more I could do.

A 49-year-old Chinese woman who died from lung cancer has been put in deep freeze in the hope that she will be brought back to life and reunited with her husband once science has found a cure for her fatal illness.

Thecryonics procedure was performed at Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute in Jinan on May 8, several minutes after Zhan Wenlian died at Shandong Universitys Qilu Hospital, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reports.

Zhan and her husbandGui Junmin had agreed to put her through the procedure, which involves low-temperature preservation of a person whose life can no longer be sustained under current science and medical knowledge, with the hope that he or she can be resuscitated and restored to full health in the future.

While some people suspect that the procedure is just another hoax, Gui expressed in a letter of consent that he knew it was not possible to revive his wife in the near future but he still he would like to give it a try.

He said he and his family believe that future advances in science and medicine will enable experts to revive his wife.

The cryopreservation was the first for a whole human body in China, although a female writer in Chongqing had had her brain frozen and preserved in 2015.

The procedure was done by Aaron Drake, a specialist in cryogenics, in cooperation with doctors from Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute and specialists from the hospital.

After more than 60 hours of work, Zhans body temperature was lowered to below minus 190 degrees Celsius before she was kept in a liquid nitrogen tank that provides a stable temperature of minus 196 degrees.

The procedure is said to cost more than 7 million yuan (US$1.05 million) plus an annual charge of 50,000 yuan for the refilling of liquid nitrogen.

But Gui only needs to pay a small portion of the amount since his wife volunteered.

Jia Chunsheng, who is in charge of Shandong Yinfeng, said cryogenics projects remain asserious scientific studies and the institute has no intention to commercialize the procedure anytime soon, news website hk01.com reported.

Jia also praised Zhan for being willing to contribute her body to scientific research, adding that her consent fuels the hope that dead people can be revived and restored to full health in the future.

In the United States, there have been about 250 people placed in cryopreservation as of 2014.

The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone By Thomas Winslow Hazlett Yale University Press 401 pages 978-0-300-21050-7 $35

Fred (Alfred E) Kahn kept fretting about the size of his fake nose. It was the 1973 Cornell Savoyards production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and he was playing the Lord Chancellor — the little man who prances around and sings the ‘Nightmare Song’. A few years later, he championed airline industry deregulation as part of the Carter administration.

In The Political Spectrum, Thomas Winslow Hazlett — a professor at Clemson University and a frequent contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason — reminds us that the job Kahn really wanted was chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). If he’d gotten that job rather than one on the Civil Aeronautics Board, Hazlett says, we’d have cheaper and better wireless service — but airfares on the “government-protected cartel of carriers” would be really expensive. One could retort: Dr David Dao. However.

This particular ‘what-if’ is a vignette in Hazlett’s history of wireless spectrum regulation, which covers American telecommunications regulation from the Radio Act of 1912 to the present. Hazlett’s basic argument is that government-regulated spectrum rights are slowly allocated (over six to 13 years) and endemically and wastefully underused.

The focus is mainly on the US, although Hazlett regards the story as having broader applicability. As he told an audience at the Adam Smith Institute in June: “Every country has its own story, but they tend to have patterns.” One of these, and the one that perhaps annoys Hazlett the most, is ‘technical reasons’ — the excuse that’s always given for not changing how things are done.

Deregulation, Hazlett argues, gave us FM radio, HBO, wi-fi, and the iPhone. Regulation was meant to provide TV services in the public interest — news, education, and so on. Instead, it gave us a TV landscape that FCC chair Newton N Minow, in a famous 1961 speech to broadcasters in Las Vegas, called a “vast wasteland”. Anyone in Britain might say: ‘But the BBC!’ Hazlett mentions it three times: once as a censor, once as a public utility studied by the economist Ronald Coase, and once (as BBC America) as one of the diverse news and information sources enabled by deregulating cable and ending the “artificial scarcity” of TV channels.

If the book has a hero, it may be Coase. In 1960, he proposed an idea, now known as the Coase theorem, that regulating the airwaves to avoid interference was unnecessary, because as long as property rights in the frequencies were well-defined, the broadcaster to whom the rights were most valuable would pay competitors not to interfere. The market, in other words, would find the most efficient frequency allocation for itself.

Coase, then 50, was much derided for this idea at the time, but lived long enough to receive the Nobel Prize in economics in 1991 and enjoy two decades of vindication before he died in 2013 at the age of 102.

Obviously this is a book that anyone involved with spectrum policy would want as a reference. What’s unexpected is that, whether or not you agree with Hazlett’s conclusions, it’s also reasonably entertaining to read — no small feat with a subject as esoteric as this.

Risk, film review: Access all Assange areas, to incoherent effectOver six years of filming, Laura Poitras follows the elusive and distant Wikileaks founder from a friend’s Norfolk estate to his Ecuadorian Embassy bolt-hole.

Move Fast and Break Things, book review: Where did the internet go wrong?Jonathan Taplin’s book examines how a handful of Silicon Valley libertarians came to dominate the internet via giant companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

To Be a Machine, book review: Disrupting life itselfMark O’Connell explores the drive to transcend biology using technology, examining ideas like the Singularity, mind uploading, cryonics, whole-brain emulation and cyborgs.

Thinking Machines, book review: AI, past, present and futureAdvances in recent decades have seen artificial intelligence develop apace, and AI now pervades our lives. Yet, as this book explains, true machine intelligence is still a work in progress.

Weve all heard the saying, you cant take it with you when you go, butwhat if I told you theres a way you can? Certainly celebrities like SimonCowell, Seth MacFarlane, and Larry King have indicated they would like to try,and with advances in cryonics, somethingthat has been around for a few decades, it may actually be possible. But it raisesthe question: how exactly do you go about paying to keep your body preserved, andat the same time growing (or at least preserving) your assets for use when youfinally come back to life? The simple answer . . . the aptly named cryonicpreservation trust.[1]

A cryonic preservation trust (CPT) functions similarly to a typical dynastytrust, but with a few different twists. For one, you must consider how to gaugethe life of the trust taking into consideration the rule against perpetuities(RAP). The logical solution is to make the cryopreservation institution abeneficiary, or simply establish your trust in a state that has done away withthe RAP, like Delaware, South Dakota, and Alaska. Of course, the grantor would have to be theprimary beneficiary to reclaim his or her assets when he or she awakens from cryopreservation.We really have no idea when revival from cryopreservation will be a viableoption, so building in flexibility for a CPT to last 100 or even 1,000 years isnecessary.

Another major difference is the list of potential beneficiaries. Whereasa typical dynasty trusts beneficiaries will be the lineal descendants of thegrantor, the purpose of a CPT is to provide the grantor with a trust incomestream to pay the annual cryonic preservation fees, and with assets when he orshe is revived. Wealthier individuals may still be able to sprinkle some of theincome generated from the assets in the CPT to lineal descendants or charity,but because they want access to the corpus when they are revived, thisnecessitates a reversion provision. But what happens if the grantor is neverrevived? Logic tells us that the CPT could simply continue on as a traditionaldynasty trust. The reversion provision would be based on an event uncertain(the grantor rising from the dead), and if that event never comes to fruition,then the reversion would never happen.

Perhaps the two greatest questions, however, are: 1) how can anindividual afford to pay for potentially hundreds of years of cryonicpreservation and expect to have assets remaining when they are revived?; and 2)what are the estate tax consequences (if there even is an estate) when theindividual is cryogenically preserved?

The answer to the first question is fairly simple. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation (Alcor),perhaps the most well-known cryopreservation organization, requires a minimum initial fundingamount of $200,000, of which $115,000 goes to the Patient Care Trust, $60,000 isfor cryopreservation, and $25,000 to the Comprehensive MemberStandby Fund. These fees are typically paid for with a life insurancepolicy for the benefit of Alcor, but can also be paid in cash or by using aCPT. It is important to note, however, that these fees are only forcryopreservation and revival, and do not include any medical treatmentnecessary to cure the previously incurable disease that the grantor died from.For this reason, it would make sense to implement a CPT so that the assetswould grow over the course of the individuals biostasis period.

The second question is probably best answered by going through ahypothetical scenario. Mr. Doe is a retired, 70-year-old widower with twochildren Jane (40 and married with one child of her own) and John (45 and marriedwith two children). He has a net worth of $5.49 million. Mr. Doe suffers froman incurable disease and wishes to be cryogenically preserved when he dies inhopes that he will be revived when a cure has been discovered. He also wants to provide a little for hischildren and grandchildren. So how would he go about doing this?

Mr. Doe comes to you asking to design a plan that will allow him to payfor his cryopreservation, provide income to his lineal descendants and charity,and grant him access to his assets once he rises from the dead. You rememberhearing about CPTs, and are very familiar with dynasty trusts, so you tell himyou know exactly what to do.

You begin drafting an ordinary dynasty trust, but start makingmodifications to ensure that the trust is valid, and limits beneficiarychallenges as much as possible. Below are a few modifications you shouldconsider:

Select an institutional trustee (forcontinuity);

Nominate a trust protector (typically a lawfirm) to ensure that Mr. Does wishes are carried out;

Provide beneficiaries with discretionarydistributions (perhaps limiting them to an ascertainable standard);

Include an interrorem clause that would disinherit a beneficiary if he or she challengesthe trusts validity;

Include a charitable beneficiary to furthersupport that the trust has eligible named beneficiaries;

Include a reversion provision (because afterall, the primary purpose of the trust is to allow Mr. Doe to have access to hisfunds when he is revived);

Provide for discretionary distributions to fundtechnological advances in cryopreservation and medical care so that Mr. Doe maybe revived more quickly; and

In the event Mr. Doe is never revived, thenprovide for the complete distribution of trust assets to named beneficiariessuch as his lineal descendants and the named charity or charities.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but itdoes provide you with several considerations when drafting a CPT. Remember thatwhen Mr. Doe is cryogenically frozen, he is legally considered dead, so theusual estate filings will be required. No one has been revived from cryostasis,so it is still to be seen what the tax consequences will be if or when ithappens.

Foreverything necessary to research, plan, and implement strategies for maximizingyour clients control while minimizing taxes, take a freetrial to the Estates,Gifts and Trusts Portfolios Library.

[1]These trusts are also referred to as cryonic suspension trusts, personalrevival trusts, or just cryonics trusts.

If there were a way to preserve your mind after you died, would you do it, even if it cost tens of thousands of dollars?

Oregon Cryonics is working to make that idea a reality. Its facility is one of only four offering the service worldwide.

From the outside the facility looks like a normal office building, and inside it looks like a normal lab, complete with gas tanks, computer screens, a refrigerator and nearby buckets.

But inside the refrigerator there is a human brain, and the buckets are full of brains, too.

Oregon Cryonics is a nonprofit group with a very specific goal.

We preserve brains. We try to preserve them with the very best structure that we can, says Executive Director Jordan Sparks, who is a computer programmer and a dentist by trade.

He wrote the software for the endeavor, and part of the facility was his previous dental office.

Sparks started working on Oregon Cryonics full time four years ago. The first brain the group preserved belonged to a dog named Cupcake. Since then it has preserved around 50 or 60 human brains.

We try to lock all the molecules in place so that future scientists can decide what to do with those molecules afterwards revive the person somehow, says Sparks.

He says the preservations are done in two ways.

One: By pumping the brain full of chemicals with a complex electronic system soon after the person dies. Two: By keeping brains cold, around negative 300 degrees.

If you have a brain thats been preserved well, the laws of physics say that you should be able to pull out all the memories, the personalities, the way that person thinks, Sparks says. Clearly, the revival technology is well over 100 years away, but were doing the preparatory work right now to let those future scientists do the revivals.

Most of the brains the ones in the buckets are not kept cold. Theyre preserved only with chemicals.

Those are ones where people donated their body to science, and were trying to perfect the technology, Sparks says. And so we do the same process on those, and then we slice up and analyze and see how good of a job we did.

He says six of the brains are being kept cold through a multistep process. It ends with them chilling in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen.

Those six are ones that are trying to get revived. Thats why theyre here, says Sparks. And so for those, we treat them differently. We treat them with extra care.

He says two of those brains are from folks who spent about $25,000 each.

Anyone can sign up for services, but you have to die close by, Sparks says, because they need to start pumping chemicals into the brain as soon as possible after death to successfully preserve it.

CI patient #153 was a 95 year old female from Florida. The patient was a CI member at the time of her death.

The patient died in the hospital during the morning of April 23, 2017. The nurses at the hospital administered heparin and the patient was cooled down promptly after death was pronounced. The next of kin had made arrangements with a local funeral director for the patients transport. The funeral director arrived at the hospital promptly after the death and the patient was transported to the funeral home and remained in water ice while flight arrangements for that afternoon were made.

The patient arrived at the CI facility, in water ice, at 6 pm on the 23rd of April, approximately 11 hours after death. The nasal temperature was 7c.

Hillary McCauley performed the perfusion. The perfusion was completed at 8:55 pm. During the perfusion there were 4 liters of 10% Eg solution used, 5 liters of 30% Eg solution used, and 10 liters of 70% VM1 solutions used. The final refractive index of the effluents exiting the right jugular vein was 1.4206. The final refractive index of the effluents exiting the left jugular vein was 1.4175. The average perfusion pressure was held at 125mm and metal cannulas were used. Flow rate started at 1.54 liters per minute and was reduced to 0.29 liters per minute by the end of the perfusion. The nasal temperature was 6.9c at the end of the perfusion. There were no blood clots noted during the perfusion and there was adequate drainage from the jugular veins. Efforts were made to perfuse the entire body, but the decision was made to perfuse only the patients head due to rapid distention of the abdomen and the absence of any evidence showing the perfusate was reaching the extremities. Considerable dehydration of the head and face was noted along with a bronzing color of the skin. Minimal edema was noted in the face at the end of the perfusion. The perfusion of the head was very successful.

The patient was then transferred to the computer controlled cooling chamber to cool to liquid nitrogen temperature. The human vitrification program was selected and the time needed to cool the patient to liquid nitrogen temperature was five days and 11 hours. The patient was then placed in a cryostat for long-term cryonic storage.

The Cryonics Institute offers the public cryonic suspensions of the highest quality at the lowest reasonable cost. This has been our mission since 1976, when CI was founded by Robert C.W. Ettinger, the scientist who founded the cryonics movement. Our goal is to preserve life at liquid nitrogen temperatures until the day when medical technologies mature to the point where our patients can be successfully revived to new life, health and even renewed youth.

Cryonics offers a second chance at life. Not surprisingly, the Cryonics Institute is not the sole organization advancing this revolutionary concept.

However, as the stewards of Robert Ettingers legacy, we believe the Cryonics Institute is the organization most vested in advancing cryonics, and as such, offers significant advantages over other cryonic suspension providers.

Our prices are lower than any other organization in fact, the most affordable prices anywhere in the world. We set our prices low because we exist only to benefit our members – we dont want to overcharge ourselves.

Our minimum whole-body suspension fee is $28,000. (For members at a distance, transportation costs and local help will be additional.) Our $28,000 fee is a one-time only payment, with no subsequent charges. It’s easily funded by life insurance or other investments subject to CI verification. One competitors cost is $200,000 for similar cryopreservation procedures and perpetual storage services. (* See more below on mandatory remote standby and how it can increase costs.)

Does our lower cost mean lower quality patient care or services? Absolutely not. Specific methods and research differ only slightly, and we believe our procedures and policies offer the best possible chance for patient survival.

While we certainly encourage our members to overfund and donate to help offset operational costs, we do not force people to pay beyond what we have determined is an adequate sum to fund our process.

The Cryonics Institutes state-of-the-art cryonic suspensions are performed by our team of experienced and trained cryonics professionals, using what we consider to be the best scientifically tested and proven procedures, equipment and vitrification formula available.

Vitrification is a key element in ensuring an optimal suspension. Our vitrification formula has been specifically formulated to minimize ice crystal formation and structural tissue damage associated with the freezing process, resulting in superior suspensions. CI made a significant research investment to arrive at this scientifically tested formula and we share the results openly. Our open source formula is freely available so that anyone who needs it can replicate it for local standby procedures, or to conduct their own independent quality tests.

Since 1976, we have successfully cryopreserved over 100 patients, all of whom are still in perfect cryostasis today. Our long proven track record of successful suspensions makes us one of the most reliable and respected cryonics organization around.

Robert C.W. Ettinger himself was cryopreserved by CI in 2011. A close examination of the late Mr. Ettingers own cryonics case report proves that a superior suspension need not involve expensive remote standby services. Solid planning utilizing local resources is a lower cost, and often superior, solution.

One might ask if the founder of cryonics chose CI (the very organization he founded) for his own cryopreservation, then why would anyone choose a different, more expensive provider? We agree CI is the best choice and hope you will too.

We have a unique, proven track record of financial security and stability, as well as price stability. CI is the only cryonics organization with no debt, no stockholders, and no landlords. We own our patient care facilities outright, and all of our member officers and directors donate their services voluntarily. We’re one of the oldest cryonics organizations in existence — and the only such organization that has never raised its prices, even in high-inflation times like the late 70s and early 80s. Adjusting for inflation, our prices have actually steadily declined.

This is a critical distinction, because as members ourselves, each and every one of us has a vested interest in the long-term viability of our organization – our facilities, cryostats and finances are built to last into the future we’re striving toward.

Importantly, CI has kept its paid staff to a minimum to avoid high labor costs of excess labor. CI has never had a case of embezzlement, employee corruption or, of course, any patients lost. Through due diligence and careful examination of our personnel and procedures, CI has avoided the negative PR and lawsuits that have plagued other organizations.

Our volunteer leadership is an importan asset. It includes very talented people with successful careers in key areas – law, acounting, investment, emergency medical technology and company CEOs – all factors critical to running a successful cryonics organization. These leaders provide their high-priced talent to CI at no cost – because they believe in the promise of cryonics for themselves and their families.

We anticipate greater growth and stability through increased membership and by helping people from all socioeconomic groups. All of CIs directors and officers are directly elected by and from our membership, giving our members institutional oversight and ownership. Many CI members volunteer time and resources, receiving no pay other than the pride and satisfaction of helping one another. All decisions are made by our members, for the benefit of our members. We have no bureacracy, and no decision-maker has any financial interest except to benefit the organization.

While some organizations make centralized remote standby mandatory, CI offers this as an option available through Suspended Animation, Inc., the same organization that serves other providers. CI does not believe in a one size fits all standby solution. Instead, we encourage members to plan and set up their own decentralized local resources. We think that the ultimate responsibility for standby relies to a certain degree with the individual member, since each member can assess his or her own individual circumstances.

Spending large sums of money for remote standby services, unfortunately does not guarantee a successful suspension. Members must take an active role in planning and not be lulled into a false sense of security. By such arrangements, Robert Ettinger himself illustrated this point through the common sense cooperation between his family and friends. He didnt need to spend an extra $170,000 to receive an optimum suspension.

For those who do choose a remote standby option, CI offers its members the identical SA remote standby option as other cryonics providers, but at a much lower cost. For some people, especially those who live close enough to remote standby resources, this option can make sense based on proximity and experience.

However, when evaluating remote standby it is wise to consider the question of time and distance from the remote standby team and the cryonics service provider. Indeed, this is recognized in many life-saving situations. While it would benefit a cardiac arrest patient to have a team of medical professionals on call to perform CPR when needed, it wouldnt help this patient if that team was two hours away and arrived too late. In contrast, a simple network of laypeople five minutes away with the capability to perform CPR would have a much better chance of saving the patient. Similarly, a vast network of volunteers is the gold standard for most of the worlds rural fire and emergency medical services. In the case of cryonics, almost every city has funeral directors willing to provide quick cool down and transport to CI.

We believe that human life comes before profit. We follow fair business practices and hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards.

We welcome you to shop around and ask questions. When you consider the alternatives, were confident that you will agree we are the best, most affordable and most trustworthy cryonics organization available.

At 11am on a Sunday morning, I slip into a row of seats in front of a podium with flower bouquets on each side. I’m here to listen to an aging white man talk about the afterlife. A woman in a fancy hat arranges a potluck lunch on a back table. Other attendees, mostly gray-haired, pass around a wicker basket and toss in $20 bills and personal checks.

We aren’t in church. This is godless Silicon Valley.

The Humanist Society has welcomed Ralph Merkle, a Livermore native, to explain cryonicsthe process of freezing a recently dead body in “liquid goo,” like Austin Powersto the weekly Sunday Forum. We all want to know about being re-awoken, or reborn, in the future.

Merkle, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford and invented what’s called “public key cryptology” in the ’70s, makes his pitch to the audience: hand over $80,000, plus yearly dues, to Alcor, and the Scottsdale, Arizonabased company will freeze your brain, encased in its skull, so that you and your memories can wait out the years until medical nanotechnology is advanced enough to both bring you back from a frozen state as well as fix the ills that brought on your death in the first place.

“You get to make a decision if you want to join the experimental group or the control group,” Merkle says. “The outcome for the control group is known.”

Alcor gained infamy in 2002, when the body of baseball legend Ted Williams was flown to the company’s Arizona headquarters, where his head was then severed, frozen and, according to some reports, mistreated.

The Humanist Society is an ideal audience for Merkle’s presentation, as its congregants aren’t held back by the tricky business of believing in a soul. Debbie Allen, the perfectly coiffed executive director and secretary of the national board of the American Humanist Association, considers cryonics a practical tool. “Religion has directed the conversation for thousands of years,” she says. Allen prefers to focus on ethics, and whether cryonics “advances the well-being of the individual or the community.”

“Science-fiction,” someone whispers behind me, as Merkle talks about nanorobots of the future. He also notes how respirocytes and microbivores can be “programmed to run around inside a cell and do medically useful things like make you healthy.”

As one might expect in a room full of humanists, skepticism runs high during the Q&A portion of the meeting. People are wondering exactly what kind of animals the scientists have used to test the cryonics process (answer: nematodes); when Alcor freezes bodies (after one’s heart stops, if a DNR, or do not resuscitate, order is requested); whether a frozen brain is any good if the rest of the body deteriorates (“Toss it,” Merkle says. “Replacement of everything will be feasible.”); and what happens if Alcor goes bankrupt.

“We take that very seriously,” the doctor says.

Lunch is served.

“Why would he want to preserve somebody like Adolf Trump?” asks Bob Wallace, 93, who ate salad and cubed cheese with his partner, Marge Ottenberg, 91, whom he met at a Humanist Society event.

“Obviously, the worst possible people are most likely to want to live forever,” says Arthur Jackson, 86, a retired junior high school teacher.

Ottenberg seems more open to the idea of coming back from the dead than her golden-year counterparts. “Whatever works,” she says.

Silicon Valley is the sort of place where people dream about nanorobots fixing our medical disorders. It’s the sort of place where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent chasing that dream.

The last five years have seen an investment boom in what’s called “life extension” research. Some of it is straight-up science, such as the Stanford lab researching blood transfusions in mice to cure Alzheimer’s. Scientists are in a race against time to help as many people as possible, as fast as possible. They’re battling a disease that saw an 89 percent increase in diagnoses between 2000 and 2014; and Alzheimer’s or other dementia is currently the sixth leading cause of death. There are also nontraditional sources of cash flowing into biotech, which was once considered a risky investment.

But death itself is the biggest social ill Silicon Valley is trying to solve.

We can build apps to keep track of diabetics’ blood glucose levels, to measure how soundly we’re sleeping and to access medical records in an instant, but none of this stops the body from wearing out. Alongside the scientists laying the medical foundation to get us to the nanorobots envisioned by Merkle, techie utopians are looking at other ways to cheat death. A cluster of tech companies are attracting far more funding from Silicon Valley than academia, shifting the research landscape with infusions of cash.

Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who sold his online payment company to PayPal for $800 million, was the first investor in Craig Venter’s Human Longevity Inc., which aims to create a database of a million human genome sequences, including people who are over 100 years old, by 2020. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who once said “Death makes me very angry” and is one of the oldest of the life-extension investors at 72, has also invested in Human Longevity. Johnson infused even more cash into the biotech field, investing another $100 million of his own money into the OS Fund in 2014, to “support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life.”

Such projects are examples of Silicon Valley’s extreme confidence in its own ability to improve the world. In an email, Johnson describes his work in grandly optimistic terms.

“Humanity’s greatest masterpieces have happened when anchored in hope and aspiration, not drowning in fear,” he says.

It takes some serious chutzpah to say you’ll extend the human lifespan, and for Johnson, he and his colleagues are venturing where no one has gone before.

“Building good technology is an act of exploration, and that it is very difficult for us to imagine the good that might come from any new technology,” Johnson says. “We proceed, as explorers, nonetheless.”

Johnson’s lofty goals are similar in scale to other giant anti-aging investments in Silicon Valley. In 2013, Google created an anti-aging lab called Calico (for “California Life Company”), hiring top scientist Cynthia Kenyon, known for altering DNA in worms to make them live twice as long as they usually do. Calico is not your local university research lab; it has $1.5 billion in the bank and has remained close-lipped about its progress, like a Manhattan Project for life extension.

For Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 43, Calico may be another way to attack a more personal health concern: Brin carries a gene that increases his likelihood of contracting Parkinson’s disease and has already invested $50 million in genetic Parkinson’s research, conducted by his ex-wife’s company, 23andMe. Brin said in 2009 that he hoped medicine could “catch up” to cure Parkinson’s before he’s old enough to develop it.

That hope is a common thread among health-obsessed tech investors like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, 49. A libertarian and Trump adviser, Thiel is trying to avoid both death and taxes. His foundation hired a medical director, Jason Camm, whose professional goals include increasing his clients’ “prospects for Optimal Health and significant Lifespan Extension.” Like Brin, who swims and drinks green tea to prevent Parkinson’s, Thiel has changed his daily habits to live longer. He’s aiming for 120, so he avoids refined sugar, follows the Paleo diet, drinks red wine and takes human growth hormone, which he believes will keep bones strong and prevent arthritis.

Thiel has also expressed personal interest in a company called Ambrosia in Monterey, where Dr. Jesse Karmazin is conducting medical trials for a procedure called parabiosis, which gives older people blood plasma transfusions from people between 16 and 25. Karmazin has enrolled more than 70 participants so far, each of whom pays $8,000 for the treatment. Much has been made of Thiel harvesting and receiving injections of young people’s blood, though Karmazin recently denied that Thiel was a client of his.

Karmazin doesn’t call himself a utopian, but he does note that his work requires some faith. “There’s always uncertainty about whether it’s going to stand the test of time, whether it’ll work at all,” he says. “That’s especially true in technology, and you have to believe in it.”

At the same time, the dystopians of Silicon Valley are preparing for the apocalypse. Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, told the New Yorker that he guesses up to 50 percent of tech executives have property in New Zealand, the hot new hub for the end of the world. Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, bought multiple motorcycles so he can weave through highway traffic if there’s a natural disaster and he needs to escape. He also got laser eye surgery so he wouldn’t have to rely on glasses or contacts in a survival scenario.

Among the dystopians is Elon Musk, whose brand-new Neuralink company is investigating what Musk calls “neural lace,” a digital layer on top of the brain’s cortex that connects us to computers. Such inventions could eventually lead us to what Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil calls “technological singularity,” or the time when ever more powerful artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, around 2045.

A burgeoning industry promises to help the wealthy defeat the ultimate equaliser: Death.

In the year 42 I.E. (Inequality Era, post-Piketty), mankind built its first hibernation machine. This allowed some to jump to the future. A brighter future, a better future. More precisely, hibernation machines became an actualisation of a powerful idea that tomorrow is better than today. A tomorrow that has a cure for cancer and diabetes, where strokes, respiratory diseases and heart attacks are a hazy remembrance (much as we think of typhoid and tuberculosis today), where longevity spans centuries, and Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, in which humans merge with A.I. to transcend biological limitations, is within reach. The end of Death and a future everlasting beckon.

But only a select few can afford hibernation machines and jump to the future: The rich and the powerful, the rentiers and the capitalists, the titans of industry and the masters of finance. Those who can afford it skip to a future paradise, while those who cannot remain in what they now perceive as a dark and depressing present, whilst building the paradise for the few.

This is a short chapter in Death’s End, the culmination of Liu Cixin’s stunning trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Former U.S. President Barack Obama recommended it, in a bygone era when leaders used to read, reflect, and write, rather than rant in 140 characters. It is fascinating to think systematically about . Are we willing to tolerate inequality in income and wealth as long as our basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are satisfied? Or will we have a revolution in our hands when inequality is literally a matter of life and death?1 Hollywood which gave us Elysium which certainly sees revolution as the most probable outcome.

This is not some abstract sci-fi scenario. Today, there are four major companies that provide cryogenic or cryonic services Alcor in Arizona, Cryonics Institute in Michigan, American Cryonics Society in California and KrioRus in Russia. Alcor seems the most developed and well-funded. Morbid as it sounds, this could be you in the future, vitrified and then stored in a thermos. Their pricing policy has a weird two-part tariff structure an annual membership fee of US$525 and then an additional US$200,000 for Whole Body Cryopreservation. There is a discount if you only cryogenically freeze your brain; and a US$10,000 premium if you live outside the United States and Canada which rises to US$50,000 if you live in China. A topic for another day is whether this is price discrimination or whether the price differences reflect cost differences.

Interestingly, only 5 percent of the U.S. population has an annual income exceeding the US$200,000 charged by Alcor. But since the amount can be paid out of retirement savings, slightly more than 10 percent of U.S. households theoretically could afford to freeze at least one person (see below). Ironically, most would be bankrupted in the process, meaning they would thaw out to penury. Theyd have to hope that the utopian future awaiting them would be free of the sort of inequality that enabled them to cheat death in the first place.

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley…

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, are reading Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari. On page 28, the book predicts that they are going to die. Death, after all, is the ultimate equaliser. Steve Jobs was unable to beat pancreatic cancer. Harari is sceptical whether Googles Calico, short for the California Life Company and founded in 2013 with a billion dollars in funding, will solve death in time to make Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin immortal. This is immensely frustrating to the likes of Brin, Page, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, all billionaires eager to stretch lives, or, at least their own, to forever in Thiel’s words.

Many believe that aging is encoded in our DNA and if anything is encoded it can be cracked. If something can be cracked, then it can be hacked. Cue applause! And cue billions of dollars for aging research with Bill Maris, the founder and CEO of Google Ventures, leading the way. In the fall of 2016, the life extension start-up Unity Biotechnology raised an enormous round of funding from Silicon Valley billionaires interested in the prospect of humans living much longer lives.

Others are bringing big data and machine learning tools to bear. BioAge Labs, whose tagline is faster drug discovery for aging, has been using machine learning and crunching genomics data to search for biomarkers that predict mortality.

Venture Vampire Capital

In 1615, a German doctor suggested that the hot and spirituous blood of a young man will pour into the old one as if it were from a fountain of youth. In 1924, the physician and Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov performed young-blood transfusions on himself. He claimed that his eyesight improved, that he stopped balding and a fellow-revolutionary wrote that he seems to have become seven, no, ten years younger. Ironically, Bogdanov injected himself with blood from a student who had both malaria and tuberculosis, and subsequently died. Today, this procedure goes by the innocuous-sounding name parabiosis a surgical union of two organisms sharing the circulation of blood. And the search for the fountain of youth continues.

Of mice and men

Researchers at Stanford University showed in a 2014 study that infusions of blood from young mice reversed cognitive and neurological impairments seen in older mice. These reinvigorated mice performed like ones half their age in memory based tests. Immediately, emails flooded the inbox of the lead researcher, Tony Wyss-Coray. Numerous billionaires, some of whom were experiencing onset of Alzheimers, wanted infusions of young blood. Some had even arranged for what the HBO show Silicon Valley termed blood boys.

There is currently a clinical trial called Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers looking for participants. The trial, run by a start-up called Ambrosia, injects young people’s blood into older people. Healthy participants aged 35 and older, pay US$8000 for a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for indicators (biomarkers) of health and aging. Thiel (yes, him again) is looking seriously into parabiosis.

Today, most reporting on these advances takes one of two perspectives: weary scepticism or unadulterated wonder. In either case, my grim forecast is that a world where such miracles of longevity are confined to billionaires will see socio-political upheaval, the likes of which will make the current hand-wringing and brow-furrowing on the rise of inequality seem quaint in comparison. In the meantime, expect a lot of books and articles and blog posts, targeted at the thought-leader industrial complex, that will at the least, make for stimulating conversation.

Pushan Dutt is the Shell Fellow of Economic Transformation and a Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD. Professor Dutt directs the Asian International Executive Programme.

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1Of course, with unequal access to health care in many countries, with direct consequences for differential mortality rates among the rich and the poor, we already live in such a world.

Cryonics is an effort to save lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond help by today’s medicine might be preserved for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health. Cryonics is a second chance at life. It is the reasoned belief in the advancement of future medicinal technologies being able to cure things we cant today.

Many biological specimens, including whole insects, many types of human tissue including brain tissue, and human embryos have been cryogenically preserved, stored at liquid nitrogen temperature where all decay ceases, and revived. This leads scientists to believe that the same can be done with whole human bodies, and that any minimal harm can be reversed with future advancements in medicine.

Neurosurgeons often cool patients bodies so they can operate on aneurysms without damaging or rupturing the nearby blood vessels. Human embryos that are frozen in fertility clinics, defrosted, and implanted in a mothers uterus grow into perfectly normal human beings. This method isnt new or groundbreaking- successful cryopreservation of human embryos was first reported in 1983 by Trounson and Mohr with multicellular embryos that had been slow-cooled using dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO).

And just in Feb. of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbits brain and, after warming it back up, showed that it was in near perfect condition. This was the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory.

Riplay: He figured he could get an alien back through quarantine if one of us was… impregnated, of whatever you call it… then frozen for the trip home. Nobody would know about the embryos we were carrying; me and Newt. Hicks: No, wait a minute, we’d all know. Ripley: Yes, the only way he’d be able to do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home, namely yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he liked. Hudson: You’re dead… you’re dog meat, pal!

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Wheatley: The reserve power ran out, so of course the whole Relaxation Center stops waking up the bloody test subjects. […] And of course, nobody tells me anything. Nooooooo, why should they tell me anything? […] And who’s fault do you think it’s going to be when the management comes down here and finds ten thousand flippin’ vegetables. […] We should get our stories straight. If anyone asks and no-one’s going to ask, don’t worry but if anyone asks, tell them as far as you know, the last time you checked, everyone looked pretty much alive. Alright? Not dead.